Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (65 page)

As ever, Orson would make a virtue out of the low budget, planning raised platforms and a series of interlocking ramps for different levels of stage action. The brick wall at the back of the stage would be painted an unsettling color: that of dried blood. Marrying ideas from
Panic
and
Faustus
, he called for lights to beam up from holes in the platforms, ramps, and stage floor.

The costuming would also be inexpensive. The character of Caesar would appear first in a black-belted uniform (his first gesture a fascist salute). The bulk of the cast would be dressed in khaki doughboy uniforms dyed dark olive green, with Sam Browne belts and boots, or in cheap hoodlum suits with upturned collars and low-brimmed hats. One exception to the general wardrobe was Brutus, the part Orson had earmarked for himself. An idealist turned betrayer, Brutus would be elegantly dressed in a custom-made double-breasted blue pinstripe suit.

When Orson was alone, he worked swiftly and furiously. Slashing away at Shakespeare’s script, he boldly combined and transposed, excising a number of scenes—including the play’s battle scenes, believing “there was never a production of Caesar with actual armies in synthetic combat that was less than a little silly.” Most of the actors would carry painted rubber daggers, but Cassius and Brutus would carry real steel weapons, which would gleam in the light.

The final script would be “a total reworking of Shakespeare,” as the scholar Andrea Janet Nouryeh wrote in her unpublished 1987 thesis, “The Mercury Theatre: A History.” “It was problematic,” commented Nouryeh, “when students came to matinees with their copies of the play. These performances were always punctuated with the noise of rapidly riffling pages.”

Never mind Shakespeare: the big news from Crawford Notch, Orson wrote to Virginia in mid-September, was that he had cinched the role of the Shadow. The ironclad six-month contract for the radio program was his most lucrative yet, including a clause that allowed him to skip the reading rehearsals. The year before, he had been happy to earn $18.50 a shot for appearances on
American School of the Air.
Now he would be guaranteed $185 weekly as the Shadow. “I wouldn’t bore you with these technicalities of contract,” Orson wrote to Virginia, “except that I think we ought to know we’re sure of next winter’s bills.”

Orson promised to return to New York in time for the premiere of the first show on the last Sunday of September. He also hoped to have the
Julius Caesar
script ready by then, with about two weeks left before the first scheduled rehearsal, allowing him a brief window of time to escape with his wife “somewhere together on a toot,” he wrote, “somewhere ridiculous and delightful where I won’t even have a script to think about and you won’t have a house to worry over.” The Caribbean, perhaps . . . but even Chicago was a possibility, if Virginia preferred.

“Let me know and I’ll make reservations anywhere,” he wrote to her. “I love you, Orson.”

The moment Orson returned from New Hampshire, however, his imagined free time evaporated. He plunged into
The Shadow
and urgent groundwork for
Julius Caesar
, spending most of his days at the Mercury Theatre and many overnights at the Algonquin Hotel, writing Virginia love notes on hotel stationery. Despite good intentions, they did not have their “toot,” then or ever. When
The Shadow
and the Mercury kept him away from Sneden’s Landing, Chubby Sherman and Whitford Kane took the trip in his stead, telling Virginia “tales of Orson.”

Along with the script for
Julius Caesar
, Orson returned from New England with a sheaf of drawings and another plasticine model of the stage set, like the one he had presented to John Houseman for the Voodoo
Macbeth.
He handed them over to Sam Leve, whose design work would be supervised by Jean Rosenthal, with instructions to spend as little money as possible. Later, when the program was drawn up, Leve would find his name conspicuously absent, because Orson insisted that the set design stemmed from his ideas. It was the first rude implementation of a Mercury Theatre policy that enforced “Production by Orson Welles” as the one credit that could override all others.

“They were Welles’s shows,” Houseman himself said later. As a member of the Mercury team, “you were production material,” Rosenthal said. “If [Welles] liked you, the association could be pleasant. If not, it was injurious. As a director, he approached other talents as he did his gargantuan meals—with a voracious appetite. Your contributions to the feast he either spat out or set aside untouched, or he ate them up, assimilated them, with a gusto which was extraordinarily flattering.”

On this production Rosenthal took over the lighting from Abe Feder, who had moved on after
The Cradle Will Rock.
Orson gave Rosenthal instructions for lighting effects that would create an unusually darkened stage with pools of illumination for the shifting scenes. “Orson dictated clearly and exactly the look he wanted . . . a very simple look based on the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg,” Rosenthal recalled. The visual scheme was both dramatic and expedient, with the lighting serving as a curtain to open and close scenes rapidly, reinforcing the fast and fluid pace Orson wanted. Rosenthal was less contentious than Feder, but when he felt like it Welles screamed at her too.

Many writers have described Orson as exploiting people mercilessly, underemphasizing their creative contributions while stealing the credit, as if this were not true of many great directors. “Some of the people around him felt they were being used,” Houseman observed later, though for many others “it was a wonderful collaborative experience.”

“Orson’s people” often fared best. The composer was perhaps his closest backstage ally, and his credit would follow Orson’s in the program: “Music by Marc Blitzstein.” According to Blitzstein’s biographer Howard Pollack, the composer was paid only a modest $200 for his
Julius Caesar
score, but he also was given a small percentage of the box office gross, and an extra $50 per week when
Caesar
went on the road in 1938. His contract also guaranteed a revival of
The Cradle Will Rock.
But
Julius Caesar
was hardly another Marc Blitzstein musical: the composer achieved his music and effects with a union-minimum four-piece ensemble: trumpet, French horn, Hammond organ, percussion. He evoked Mussolini’s “Giovinezza” for Caesar’s anthem, and sweetened a sonnet for the young page Lucius to sing to the doomed Brutus.

“[Blitzstein’s] name could be counted on to help attract that leftist front that had rallied behind
The Cradle
and that Welles and Houseman now hoped might support their new company,” wrote Pollack in
Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World.
The leftist groups and organizations were crucial to the Mercury’s hopes for success. Houseman even wrote a piece for the communist organ
The Daily Worker
, assuring left-wing theater enthusiasts that the new Mercury Theatre was another step toward “a real People’s Theatre in America.”

Blitztein and Orson remained close friends; and when the
Columbia Workshop
commissioned a half-hour musical from Blitzstein, he wrote an episode that revolved around a composer’s search for the right socially conscious lyrics to match his melody. Blitzstein dedicated his first original radio opera, called
I’ve Got the Tune
, to Welles, who was announced to play the lead role. When Orson’s schedule conspired against it, Blitzstein himself stepped into the part—but Welles was there in the booth, along with Houseman and composer Kurt Weill, when the show was broadcast by WABC on October 24, 1937.

Despite its newly hung sign, the Mercury Theatre was still being renovated in early November, when Orson needed to start blocking the cast. For about two weeks the cast had to be transported to the old film studios at Fort Lee in New Jersey, where the ramps and platforms were under construction. For most of the troupe, the journey involved a subway trip, a ferry across the Hudson, and finally a bus ride to Fort Lee. (Orson arrived in a chauffeured limousine—one of his many new perks.)

The Mercury partners had assembled a company that would go down in Broadway history. George Coulouris had thought little of Orson when they shared a dressing room during the short-lived
Ten Million Ghosts
; he changed his mind after seeing
Faustus
, phoning Orson to praise the show. Orson returned the favor generously, offering Coulouris his choice of two parts in the first Mercury Theatre production. “If you want to play Mark Antony, I’ll play Brutus, and if you want to play Brutus, I’ll play Antony.” Coulouris chose Antony.

Chubby Sherman was a shoo-in to be a founding member of the Mercury ensemble, and Orson cast him in the role of “envious Casca,” as Mark Antony calls him, one of Caesar’s assassins. Another core member was Joseph Cotten, who saw Orson nearly every day in the radio studios, or at the theater. Cotten would play several parts, including Publius, another conspirator. Martin Gabel was not very lean or hungry-looking, as Shakespeare described Cassius, but rather short and stocky. But he was an intense actor with a commanding voice, and his proven history with Orson won him that role.

The part of Caesar went to Joseph Holland, an American-born actor who had trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and toured nationally with Katharine Cornell in Shaw’s
Saint Joan
in 1936. John Hoysradt, Orson’s roommate in 1933–1934 during the Cornell tour and now a neighbor at Sneden’s Landing, became Decius Brutus. John A. Willard (Trebonius) and Grover Burgess (Ligarius) were veteran multitalents. The two female principals were Evelyn Allen as Calpurnia and Muriel Brassler as Portia. “As so often happened in Welles’ classical productions,” Houseman wrote, the actresses usually played lesser roles, and were “decorative, adequate and hardly memorable.” (Houseman failed to mention that the same could be said of the roles as written.)

Actor Norman Lloyd, who was cast as Cinna the poet, was one of “Houseman’s people.” Houseman had urged Orson to meet with his friend Lloyd, a classically trained actor with a résumé full of small Broadway parts and appearances in left-wing and Federal Theatre Project productions. Orson approved Lloyd for the first Mercury season at the going minimum. Elliott Reid
²⁸
(Cinna the conspirator) and Arthur Anderson (Lucius the page) were not yet out of their teens, both just starting out in radio, where they had met Orson. Stefan Schnabel (Metullus Cimber) was the son of the Austrian classical pianist Arthur Schnabel and the contralto Therese Behr. A Jewish refugee from Hitler, Schnabel had cut his teeth in the Old Vic company of
Hamlet
starring a British actor Orson was just getting to know, Laurence Olivier.

The twenty-one professionals would earn $40 per week as mandated by Equity. Junior players, less established, were paid $25. More than a dozen extras, young and ambitious, would earn $1 a day playing attendants, citizens, soldiers, and senators—until they threatened a strike during rehearsals and their salaries were raised to $15 weekly. The extras were “the cream of the New York beginners’ crop,” in the words of Mercury stage manager Walter Ash; they included the strike leader and future film director John Berry. (One supernumerary, George Lloyd, played the “dead” Caesar for a whole scene, breathing through a papier-mâché mask designed by Bil Baird.)

Finally, Orson telephoned the blond, handsome William Mowry Jr., the Todd School football player who knew his Shakespeare, and invited him to make his professional debut as the tribune Flavius, who opposes Caesar. Edgerton Paul, busy in a Theatre Guild production, passed the stand-in torch to Mowry, who had played Brutus at Dartmouth. Mowry obliged, “even [serving as Orson’s stand-in] through—this is hard for some people to believe—some of the
dress
rehearsals,” he later recalled.

Avoiding rehearsals until the last moment may have seemed a bad habit, but it served Orson well, helping him avoid the boredom of repetition, while keeping the other actors on edge. He never stood in quite the same place, or spoke in quite the same manner, as the stand-in.

One day, William Alland—the aspiring actor who’d dogged Welles’s steps during
The Second Hurricane
—caught up with him outside the theater and impressed him by spouting from memory Mark Antony’s funeral oration for Caesar. He was rewarded with the small part of Marcullus. More important, Alland—or “Vakhtangov,” as Orson dubbed him in honor of the influential Soviet stage director—became the first of many young people who pledged a kind of informal fellowship with Orson and his genius. Indeed, Alland and others who followed in his footsteps became known to insiders as “Orson’s slaves”—holding script, running errands, delivering food to his dressing room, and competing to serve his whims.

Though Orson was always, singularly, Orson Welles, his personality seemed to morph and metastasize with each success. The happy summer of 1937, the time alone in New Hampshire, and the launching of the Mercury Theatre clearly marked a fork in the road. Orson was no longer the young unknown dubbed “Shoebooty” by the all-black company of the Voodoo
Macbeth.
These days he wore expensive shoes. He had a chauffeur, a speedboat, and a country home. He transformed himself physically too, nowadays indulging in morning shaves and manicures before settling in for a long lunch at “21.” Dieting to keep slender and boyish, he adopted a consciously foppish style—“wild camp,” he called it later—modeled after actor-director Alfred Lunt. (“One of the best actors we ever had!”) “I see myself in those old stills,” Welles told Leaming, “and I see somebody that could very easily be thought of as a faggot.”

Orson’s carefully presented anecdotes about his womanizing were often anecdotes about coitus interruptus or fumbling lovemaking in practice. Indeed, there were so many boastful anecdotes—mixed with so many disclaimers about dandyism and impotence—that some critics and scholars have raised doubts about his heterosexuality.