Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (71 page)

When he arrived at the hospital, Welles later confessed to Barbara Leaming, ballerinas were more on his mind than fatherhood. He could not keep himself from flirting with an attractive hospital nurse, whose lithe shapely figure he correctly identified as that of a former danseuse.

Proudly but uncomfortably, Orson held his baby daughter in his arms. He always said that he’d christened his firstborn while she was still in her mother’s womb, and he’d been expecting a boy. That she was a girl did not matter: “Christopher” became her name.

As a little girl, more than once, Orson’s daughter asked her famous father, “Daddy, why did you call me ‘Christopher’?”

“I liked the sound of it—Christopher Welles. Your name has a marvelous ring to it, don’t you think?”

“But I’m a girl, Daddy.”

“So you are, and a very beautiful one, too.”

“But Daddy, girls aren’t called Christopher.”

“That’s right. You’re the only girl in the world who is, and that makes you unique as well as beautiful.”

“What does
unique
mean?”

“Different from everyone else.”

“But Daddy, I don’t want to be different. The kids at school tease me about having a boy’s name.”

“When you’re older, they’ll envy you. Wait and see, darling girl. The day will come when you’ll love your name and thank your old father.”

At that point in the conversation, as Chris Welles Feder recalled in her candid memoir,
In My Father’s Shadow
, Orson usually paused to light a cigar, “his eyes twinkling at me through the cloud of horrible-smelling smoke,” in her words.

“Do you know what I did right after you were born?”

“No, what?”

“I sent out telegrams to everyone we know.
CHRISTOPHER
,
SHE
IS
HERE
.”

More than once, Orson told this anecdote of the wonderful telegram, “how in just four words, a marvel of economy, my father had said it all,” recalled Feder. As she grew older, however, she sometimes wondered whether the name “Christopher” wasn’t simply her father’s excuse for a clever telegram. In 1985, as her plane touched down in Los Angeles for his funeral, it occurred to her that she had never seen one of those legendary telegrams.

George Bernard Shaw’s contract with the Mercury Theatre claimed a substantial portion of all the ticket revenue for
Heartbreak House
, starting at 5 percent of $250, with his share rising to 15 percent of all proceeds exceeding $1,500. “For a theater with less than 700 seats and ticket prices between $.55 and $2.20,” Andrea Janet Nouryeh wrote, “these royalty figures were astronomical,” and virtually guaranteed that the Mercury would never turn a profit on the production.

Moreover, the agreement strictly prevented any deviation from the original script—and this stipulation also applied to the main set, which the script described in detail, including the common room of a country residence, with windows, doors, lockers, benches, bookshelves, and drawing tables of heavy timber resembling “an old-fashioned high-pooped ship.” The shiplike setting prompted “the first solid scenery we built,” grumbled John Houseman, which “cost us a fortune,” because Orson “insisted on genuine paneling indoors and real gravel cemented to the ground cloth for the exterior ‘so the footsteps will sound right.’ ” Ultimately, wrote Nouryeh, “critics universally admired the results” of the costly stage setting.

This shiplike country home belongs to an eccentric retired seafarer, an octogenarian, Captain Shotover, whose “immense white beard,” in the words of the script, made the part a natural for Orson. Shaw makes the half-ship home a metaphor for complacent England, adrift amid the brewing storm of World War I. (Society needs a better navigator, someone like crusty Captain Shotover.) Though replete with sparks of brisk Shavian wit, the play is also didactic and pessimistic. Timely when it was written, it was timely again in 1938.

The script featured ten speaking parts, but only a handful of supporting players were drawn from the active Mercury roster: George Coulouris as Boss Mangan; Vincent Price as Hector Hushabye, married to Shotover’s flamboyant eldest daughter Hesione; and John Hoysradt as Randall Utterword, married to another Shotover daughter, Ariadne. Again “determined to avoid the stigma of stock casting,” in Houseman’s words, the partners shopped for fresh faces.

The part of Hesione, the play’s lead female character, had been designated for Aline MacMahon as part of her agreement covering
The Duchess of Malfi.
When that play fell through unpleasantly, however, MacMahon backed out of the Shaw production. Orson wanted Mady Christians as her replacement, but Houseman disagreed, believing that Christians, who had been born in Vienna, would be miscast as a free-spirited Englishwoman. Welles and Christians would prove him wrong, as Houseman later conceded.

Orson picked an old acquaintance from his days with Katharine Cornell, Brenda Forbes, for Nurse Guinness; and the Australian actress Phyllis Joyce as the Captain’s less bohemian daughter, Ariadne (Lady Utterword). For Geraldine Fitzgerald he saved the role of Ellie, a rival of Hesione’s, who is engaged to marry the business tycoon Boss Mangan. Ellie was the play’s pivotal and most likable character.

He asked Theatre Guild stalwart Erskine Sanford to play the seemingly mild-mannered Mazzini Dunn, the father of Ellie, who is actually running Boss Mangan’s empire. Sanford had played the same character in the original New York production of 1920, and Orson loved that kind of symmetry. Just as important, he remembered Sanford from the A. A. Milne comedy
Mr. Pim Passes By
, which he’d seen as a boy when it passed through Kenosha on tour.
Heartbreak House
brought Sanford permanently into Welles’s fold. He would portray the dethroned
Inquirer
editor in
Citizen Kane
and would be conspicuous in Orson’s radio shows, as well as
The Magnificent Ambersons
,
Jane Eyre
,
The Stranger
,
The Lady from Shanghai
, and
Macbeth.

Orson spent the month between that aborted first rehearsal on March 27, and the play’s opening night on April 29, coolly orchestrating the staging of
Heartbreak House
, which would take the place of
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
in the Mercury rotation. He and Coulouris ceded their roles in
Julius Caesar
to Tom Powers and Edmond O’Brien from the touring company.

Heartbreak House
was a wordy play, but Orson was comfortable with verbosity, and he always had loved Shaw’s wordplay. Still, as scholar Andrea Janet Nouryeh has pointed out, his production sneaked changes into the prescribed version. His staging accelerated the play’s pacing by discarding ordained exits and entrances, and it broke up and overlapped many passages of dialogue, while creating moments of “great stillness” to enhance its dramatic high points.

The rehearsals were no more chaotic than usual, but time was short, and perhaps there was less team spirit with the new team. Vincent Price, for one, was never “very happy” in his assigned role, Welles recalled. (“He was particularly vexed that he was required to stand still and listen to other actors talking at great length, as actors do in Shaw.”) Coulouris clashed with Fitzgerald, patronizing the newcomer and undermining her confidence. They feuded. The other actors liked Fitzgerald, though, and even Price thought Welles directed her “with such affection and care that she stole almost every scene from him.”

As much as critics admired the Mercury production, their praise was backhanded, with many feeling that Shaw had painted the typically bold Orson into a tight corner. “There is nothing experimental in the Mercury Theatre’s revival,” Richard Lockridge wrote in the
Sun.
“This time their experiment is merely the simple, and fine, one of putting on a provocative, stimulating play as straightforwardly and effectively as they know how.” John Anderson of the
Evening Journal
called it “an average stock company production, by no means up to the distinguished standard set by the Mercury.”

Again the lead player as well as the director, Orson was as always a lightning rod for the reviewers. Wearing nose putty, a white wig, and a full beard and mustache, the transformation completed by liver spots on his hands, he anchored the production. His performance predictably disappointed some critics (“workmanlike,” sniffed the
Times
) while pleasing many others (“much better than I have ever seen him,” wrote Lockridge in the
Sun
). Even his fellow cast members were divided: Price thought Welles was “not very good in it because he never rehearsed with us,” while Forbes thought his performance “brilliant,” though she was disgusted by Orson’s “outrageous behavior at curtain time” (the first scene was sometimes held up until he had finished dinner in his dressing room).

In any case, audiences flocked to
Heartbreak House
, and, like
Julius Caesar
, the show would entertain packed crowds until its run ended. And on May 6, his twenty-third birthday, Orson could celebrate by pointing to his photograph on the cover of
Time
magazine, where his unmistakably boyish eyes peered out of the caked, bearded visage of ancient Captain Shotover. “George Orson Welles,” read the May 9, 1939, headline: “Shadow to Shakespeare, Shoemaker to Shaw.”

The five-page spread inside was a promoter’s dream. The article declared young Orson a “Marvelous Boy,” while reviewing, complete with errors and embellishments, his life story thus far: Kenosha, the Todd School, the Gate Theatre, the Federal Theatre Project, the Mercury. Orson admitted to being the “Caesar (not Brutus)” of the Mercury—that is, “pretty dictatorial” when it came to the stagecraft of Mercury productions. (“Houseman runs the business end,” the article noted.) The Mercury’s maiden season was only a springboard to the future, said the profile’s anonymous author. “The sky is the only limit his ambitions recognize.”

The cover story did not delve very deeply into Welles’s private life, describing his Sneden’s Landing residence as only modestly luxurious (“eight rooms and four nooks, $115 a month”) and his burgeoning family in three brief sentences: “Welles met his wife, dainty blonde Virginia Nicholson [
sic
] Welles, while both were acting in a summer drama festival in 1934, married her that fall. Last month their first child was born. A girl, she was christened Christopher.”

The real picture was more complicated. Two weeks after the
Time
story, Tilly Losch took her passage to Europe—and Orson’s overlapping flirtations with Geraldine Fitzgerald and ballerina Vera Zorina heated up.

Orson’s attitude toward affairs was elliptical, however. Charles Foster Kane does not necessarily make love to Susan Alexander before the scandal that ends his marriage and political career,
³⁰
and sex and love were often extraneous to the power-and-glory-obsessed characters Orson played most convincingly on stage and screen. (Playing a Nazi monster in
The Stranger
, he seems unaroused even by the lovely Loretta Young.) Whatever sexual activity Welles engaged in outside his marriage to Virginia, in those days before
Citizen Kane
it was less than rumored or boasted.

One night during the run of
Heartbreak House
, Welles and Fitzgerald decided to elope—or so the actress told her son, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, many years later.

“Elope?” her son asked. (The word was “an odd one,” Lindsay-Hogg wrote in his memoir,
Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age in Hollywood, New York, and Points Beyond
, “since they were both married.”)

“Let me tell you in my own way,” Fitzgerald said. “One Saturday night, after the show, we were going to elope. He’d hired a car and we were going to New Jersey to a motel, and then we kissed in the back seat of the car and I realized it was the kiss of a brother and not a lover and so the car turned around and we went back to the city and Orson came up to the room with me, where Eddy [her husband, Edward Lindsay-Hogg] was asleep, and Orson patted his foot over the blanket and said, ‘Everything’s all right, old fellow. Nothing to worry about.’ And then he left.”

Vera Zorina was the second ballerina Virginia identified to Frank Brady as a mistress of her husband’s. Born in Berlin, raised in Norway, with intense blue eyes and blond hair cascading to her shoulders, Zorina was even younger than Orson—only twenty-one in 1938.

Her reputation as a dancer had been established in the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, where she became the lover of choreographer Léonide Massine, who was married at the time to another member of the troupe. Zorina had starred in the London production of Rodgers and Hart’s
On Your Toes
and also in George Balanchine’s
Slaughter on Tenth Avenue
, a ballet scored by Rodgers and Hart. Samuel Goldwyn brought her to Hollywood in 1937 for the filming of
The Goldwyn Follies
, in which Balanchine staged her American debut in the “water nymph ballet,” rising up from a pool of water in gold lamé. Living in New York since late 1937, Zorina danced with Balanchine’s troupe, and was attached to Balanchine himself as his lover.

Captivated by Orson after seeing him onstage in
Julius Caesar
, Zorina gravitated to him at parties and found she liked him even better in person. They started meeting surreptitiously, sharing heart-to-hearts late at night. Welles was still in his Alfred Lunt phase: “a romantic-looking man” as Zorina recalled in her memoir, “somewhat Byronic, with one quizzical eyebrow slightly raised, and often laughing in a special throaty way. I think we would call him ‘sexy’ today.”

Yet, again, there were obstacles to actual lovemaking: not Balanchine, who was “used” to Orson chasing after his ballerinas (as Welles told Leaming), but the dancer’s mother, who still traveled with her. Anxious to conceal their “passionate courtship” from the mother, who was on Balanchine’s side, the two had to avoid any public displays of affection. “Mama wouldn’t have allowed it,” Welles explained to Leaming. Orson himself later said that he found such obstacles “a big help” to him, a stimulating test: “It was all very difficult, which was the ideal situation for me because I—thank God—matured before the sexual revolution. I like to be hard to get at!” And Balanchine was not his only competition: also vying for Zorina’s affections was “a very famous European actress who liked to fill the ballerina’s room with flowers.”