Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (66 page)

In one early French book about Welles, Maurice Bessy described him as “a Don Juan at heart,” adding, “Welles knows—and has openly stated—that the mythic Don Juan is simply an unsatisfied homosexual, for whom the incessant quest for an ideal woman masks his search for himself.” Speaking to Henry Jaglom, Welles claimed he went to court to stop Bessy’s book, which is still in print today. “He’s a mean, little, crooked fairy,” Welles said of Bessy, adding that the author used to join him and Micheál MacLíammóir for meals in Paris during the filming of
Othello.
“Well, when I am with a homosexual, I get a little homosexual. To make them feel at home, you see? Just to keep Michael comfortable, I kind of camped a little. To bring him out. So he wouldn’t feel he was with a terrible straight. Bessy might have seen that.”

Although he worked often and happily with many gay and bisexual artists onstage and screen—Marc Blitzstein is just one example—Orson too often wielded homosexuality as a blunt weapon in arguments. He made his enemies into egregious homosexuals: Captain Mueller, Micheál MacLíammóir, even John Houseman. Virgil Thomson and Houseman “roomed together,” Welles reminded Jaglom, adding, “They were lovers.” There is no proof of this, and Thomson had a lifelong homosexual companion, the painter Maurice Grosser. But Orson was convinced that Houseman was a closet homosexual who had a crush on him. About three weeks after they met, Welles went on, speaking to Jaglom, “He said to me, ‘I keep dreaming of you riding bareback on a horse.’ And I should have taken that more seriously. But I just laughed.”

Respected Welles experts such as Simon Callow and Joseph McBride have given some credence to scuttlebutt about the director’s affairs with men, while tracing homosexuality as “an increasingly overt theme” in late-career works such as
Chimes at Midnight
(as suggested by the Hal-Poins relationship) and
F for Fake
(whose protagonist is the gay art forger Elmyr de Hory).

According to Callow, who tried hard to pinpoint Orson’s sexuality, William Alland “avers that without question” that Welles and longtime crony Francis Carpenter, cast as Octavius in Orson’s new production, “had a sexual relationship.” But how did Alland know for sure? The author leaves this stone unturned, and for what it is worth, Carpenter—“camp beyond the dreams of Quentin Crisp,” according to Callow—was married and had children.

William Mowry Jr. also believed that Welles engaged in the “bisexual chic” that was prevalent in New York artist circles. But Mowry too balked at supplying the details in his Columbia University oral history, insisting, “I know he had [some] men. . . . But I think he did it only to prove to himself that he was [heterosexual].”

Regardless, Mowry believed that Welles spent most of his time chasing women. “Some of the girls in the Mercury Theatre got their jobs through sleeping with Orson,” Mowry insisted, adding, “He tried to screw the girl who became my first wife”—a dramatic recitalist named Sherrard Pollard from the Neighborhood Playhouse, who was also involved with the Mercury. Orson “tried” for Pollard simply because he could. Orson was “sadistic in many ways,” said Mowry.

But there is scant proof of active bisexuality on Orson’s part. Some people prefer their geniuses to be pansexual, and some geniuses may find it useful to be seen that way too. Orson’s newly preening behavior in the fall of 1937 may have been deliberate misdirection. Orson cultivated the image of a dandy, even while women constantly fluttered around him. He covered all the assumptions while affirming none.

Gone was the young, attentive Orson, sensitive to the hunger of his fellow actors. Orson shed the egalitarianism of the Federal Theatre Project, dining on steak and mushrooms from Longchamps in front of everyone during the rehearsals. The scent of the food, and Orson’s indifference, infuriated some of the actors—perhaps not the worst thing for a play about a conspiracy to bring down an autocrat. The despotic Orson rubbed it in by ordering a magnificent chocolate cake from Schrafft’s, contemplating it solemnly, then finally ordering it removed, untouched. “I’ve had my dessert, my
spiritual
dessert,” he’d announce, before turning with a sigh to half a grapefruit.

More than a few films have incorporated Orson Welles as a character, and one of the best is Richard Linklater’s
Me and Orson Welles
(2008), which takes audiences behind the scenes of
Julius Caesar
in the fall of 1937. While Linklater’s film makes no pretense of strict accuracy, the script weaves the facts into credible fiction, and Christian McKay’s performance, as flamboyant as it is loving, is the best fictional Orson on screen to date.

As depicted scathingly in
Me and Orson Welles
, the Mercury ensemble underwent the now customary Welles regimen during
Julius Caesar
: torturous late-night rehearsals, battles royal over the complicated sound and lighting cues, the angry shouting matches between Welles and Houseman that had become ritualized.

Since he was now paying them over his and Houseman’s signature, Orson no longer treated the actors like amateurs on the dole. If a performer asked, “Why am I doing this in such and such a scene?” Orson might snap, “Because of your Friday paycheck!” When the actors got distracted, he would settle them down by shouting, “All right, children!” When otherwise disciplined actors started hamming it up, he cried, “Shame on you!” Coming from a twenty-two-year-old, his tactics irked some of the older cast members. Perhaps Orson really exploded only “a few times,” as Elliott Reid recalled, but when he did “it was a formidable thing to watch”: he popped up like a jack-in-the-box from the back of the theater, streaked down the aisle like a comet, and leaped onstage, screaming all the way.

Orson’s directing style provoked a range of responses from the actors, and their feelings about his behavior were often closely aligned with their belief in his genius. Actors recognized an artistic temperament when they encountered one. Orson rarely ruffled Joseph Cotten’s feathers, for example. Cotten’s customary aplomb, and his deep friendship with Welles, helped sustain their mutual admiration.

George Coulouris, on the other hand, was a “grumbler” by nature, “very temperamental and very barometric,” in his own words. “The [
Julius Caesar
] rehearsals were bad,” Coulouris recalled years later. “He kept us waiting for hours.” Even Coulouris conceded that Orson employed peculiar means to achieve often extraordinary ends. “I think he’s a genius,” Coulouris observed, “but that is to say he’s a genius who has flashes of imagination that galvanize a show, but sometimes the intervals are not galvanic at all.”

With
Caesar
, for instance, Coulouris thought Orson wasted too much time drilling crowd movements at the expense of guiding the principals. Welles was “preoccupied with timing and marching,” recalled Coulouris, “and had the cast marching around like idiots for hours.”

Norman Lloyd, a fastidious man who disliked messy methods and peculiar behavior, was even more grudging in his assessment. “Discipline at rehearsal [for
Julius Caesar
] was not of a model nature,” Lloyd complained in his memoir
Stages: Of Life in Theatre, Film and Television.
“Orson might arrive at rehearsal and be amused to talk about something for two hours, or do an imitation of Maurice Evans’s Falstaff or of Guthrie McClintic, with whom he had worked. Or he told jokes. Finally, he would get around to the scene, which he would rehearse once over lightly before he left.”

Lloyd’s perspective may have been colored by the professional psychodrama he underwent during these rehearsals. In his earnest attempt to strike the right note for the part of Cinna the poet, who is murdered by Caesar’s followers after they mistake him for Cinna the conspirator, he found himself in a war of wills with Orson. This was not a major scene in the play traditionally—the poet Cinna has only a few lines—and Orson did not appear very engaged by the staging of Cinna’s death during rehearsals.

For weeks, in fact, Orson handed Lloyd over to Marc Blitzstein, who had the actor beating a tom-tom to an accelerating metronome while extras playing the murder mob chanted phrases Orson had poached from
Coriolanus.
Lloyd felt his big scene was going nowhere.

He wasn’t the only actor in this production who feared that his performance was disappearing down a hole. In some cases literally: as with
Faustus
, the trap holes cut into the stage floor created a dangerous risk of plunging into the basement. Orson was “amazed and indignant,” recalled Houseman. “Were they not actors? And were not traps among the oldest and most consecrated devices of the stage? They must stop being amateurish and craven . . .” Until, that is, Welles himself fell into a trap hole flanking the top ramp, plummeting to the cellar floor and spraining his ankle. Then, safety measures were taken.

The actors were also uneasy about Orson’s penchant—some saw it as a mania—for aural experimentation. Orson brought in radio man Irving Reis to create recordings of Antony’s and Brutus’s speeches for the extras to listen to and practice their reactions. He also asked Reis to create a mix of recorded street sounds—traffic noise, police sirens, and air-raid warnings—which would be broadcast as background ambience during certain scenes. Orson worried the actors by spending an inordinate amount of time fiddling with the levels of this “sound track,” which seemed to them like a tumult drowning out the import and clarity of their lines.

He drove the cast hard, yet he drove himself hardest. The technical rehearsals, one week before previews, were a hellish experience, with Orson testing the lights and sound “until the stage hands dropped like flies,” according to Lloyd, “and the actors became punch drunk.” Orson prided himself on staying on his feet all day and all night, but when he wasn’t stealing catnaps at a nearby hotel he might be found snoring in the orchestra seats as the company arrived for the morning run-through. The devoted Augusta Weissberger kept him buzzing with fresh coffee; her mother contributed homemade chicken soup.

Rehearsals were always a chance for Welles to try out and refine his ideas for staging. He had intended, for example, to pad the platforms and ramps to muffle the sound of the marching actors’ boots, but when the padding proved too expensive, he embraced the resulting thundering-herd effect, which enhanced the tension in the crowd scenes. The lighting design, the sound effects cues, and even his beloved trap holes were adjusted each time he revised a scene.

Originally scheduled to premiere on November 6,
Julius Caesar
had to be postponed until November 11, its first public performance to be preceded by one week of invitation-only previews. The Mercury was in a bad financial state, and Houseman, still moonlighting some days as a professor at Vassar, was fast coming unglued. “All our investors’ money” had been spent, he recalled, largely on the renovation and actors’ salaries. The unpaid bills were accumulating.

Lloyd was not alone in foreseeing a personal and professional fiasco in the making, for him and the nascent Mercury Theatre. Lloyd did not warm to Welles any faster than Welles warmed to Lloyd, and the actor was increasingly flummoxed by the director’s seeming indifference to his scenes. Finally, just before the first dress rehearsal, Lloyd confronted Welles, saying he felt unrehearsed and wanted to drop the poet’s death scene altogether. “He [Orson] accepted this calmly,” Lloyd recalled. “If I didn’t want to go on, that was all right.”

In his book
Run-Through,
Houseman offered a plausible explanation for the impasse between Welles and Lloyd. “In every production we did together,” he observed, “there were one or more moments which came to embarrass or bore [Welles]—either because he had become disillusioned with the performers or because he realized that his own original conception of the scene had failed, and he was uncertain which way to turn. In
Julius Caesar
the lynching of Cinna the Poet had become such a block.”

The audience was always the real test for Orson, and he treated previews as a last chance for changes—a derring-do-or-die. When the Mercury Theatre finally opened its doors and performed
Julius Caesar
for its initial invitation-only audience in the first week of November, the lighting, music, and sound cues were a mess, according to most accounts, and the crowd scenes dragged. Still, no one thought the show was terrible—until the curtain came down.

Lloyd was watching in the wings, feeling “really very angry” that Orson had called his bluff and dropped Cinna’s death scene from the invitation-only performance. Lloyd refused to come out and line up with the rest of the company for the expected ovation and bows. Then an astonishing thing happened: the ovation never came. Accounts differ, but according to most who were there, a smattering of applause trickled quickly into silence. Then the audience simply stood and filed out of the theater. The cast was in shock, Orson stupefied and humiliated.

The Mercury’s publicist Henry Senber darted onstage, sputtering, “Jesus, Orson! We can’t even get one curtain call!” Furious, Orson stared down at Senber, “cleared his throat, produced a large blob of phlegm and spat right in Hank’s face,” according to Lloyd’s memoir. As everyone froze in horror, Senber reared back to punch Orson in the face. The publicist would have delivered his blow, too, if Orson hadn’t grabbed Senber by the shoulders first. “Spit in my face! Please! Please! Spit in my face!” the director pleaded. “Hank did so,” Lloyd reported in his memoir. “The terrible moment had passed, and they were friends again.”

Julius Caesar
was doomed, unless Orson could save it. Over the next several days, as the date of the true premiere neared, he plunged into round-the-clock salvation. No more experimentation: now was the time for ruthless decision making. Orson’s prerecorded ambient sound track, which only distracted everyone, was abandoned. (“What was brilliant on the sophisticated electronic equipment at the radio station,” wrote Andrea Janet Nouryeh, “sounded laughable when played on the inadequate sound system at the theater.”) The lighting cues were narrowed, simplified.