Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (74 page)

Orson could sometimes get mired in effects, going to such lengths that he drove the technicians crazy. But time and again, that summer and throughout his radio career, his imaginative efforts enhanced the shows. To attain the ambience of the Château d’If for a summer adaptation of
The Count of Monte Cristo
, for instance, he again arranged actors and microphones in a men’s room. For a version of
A Tale of Two Cities
, he expended an inordinate amount of time trying to capture the sound of Sydney Carton’s decapitation, which had to simulate the head being severed and dropping into a basket. A sound specialist experimented with a melon, a pillow, a coconut, and a leg of lamb before Orson finally chose a head of cabbage.

After talking the stories over with Houseman, Welles left his partner to his own devices. Orson would drop in regularly to make criticisms and changes in the scripts, but the first drafts were Houseman’s responsibility. Houseman worked much the way Orson himself often worked on scripts, lying in bed in his apartment that summer, surrounded by copies of the book they were adapting, samples of usable scripts for reference, and an array of tools: scissors, a paste pot, a supply of pencils. It was an important job, and Houseman mastered it.

Though the story may be apocryphal, Houseman claimed that the partners stayed up all night at Reuben’s Delicatessen on East Fifty-Eighth Street, brainstorming the “Dracula” script, after Orson shuffled it ahead of “Treasure Island” “two days before rehearsal.” Fueled by coffee, cognac, and two meals (the second one of “large steaks, very rare, followed by cheesecake and more coffee and brandy”), they finished with breakfast at dawn, Houseman wrote. They certainly pulled similar all-nighters several times that summer to meet deadlines for the radio series.

As producer of the program, Orson always had other business to mind, casting major roles even as the script was in progress, molding the parts to available actors. For “Dracula,” Orson turned to the Mercury stage ensemble: Martin Gabel would play Professor Van Helsing, Dracula’s archenemy; and George Coulouris would be Dr. Seward, Harker’s romantic rival. Orson lured his radio colleagues Agnes Moorehead to play Mina, Harker’s fiancée; and Ray Collins to portray the Russian boat captain transporting Dracula’s body to England.

This was the first time Orson was in charge of a true broadcast series—rather than a one-off serial like
Les Misérables
—and every major decision was his. Whereas in the past he had relied largely on Houseman’s extended circle of bohemians and artists—Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles, Aaron Copland, Lehman Engel—to provide music for his productions, now he was working with Bernard Herrmann, not just as an actor but for the first time as Herrman’s boss. It was an adjustment for both men. Herrmann had to align his musical ideas to the scenes as Orson described them, before the script for “Dracula” was actually completed, preparing not only main themes and recurrent motifs, but also the incidental touches and musical bridges that would bolster narrative transitions throughout the radio drama. According to his biographer Steven C. Smith, Herrmann created a sparse but “thrilling” score, with a stinging theme “for muted brass and graveyard bell, and a crackling variant of the Dies Irae for Jonathan Harker’s driverless coach ride up the Borgo Pass.”

Published anecdotes tend to emphasize the tempestuousness of the relationship between Welles and Herrmann, who had been thrown together awkwardly on several previous radio programs. But even before the replacement series, and increasingly over the summer, the two men developed mutual warmth and appreciation. “Both men deeply respected the other’s strong will, nonconformity, and old-world romanticism,” wrote Smith.

Both believed in radio and its potential for artful popular entertainment. Like Orson, Herrmann was a connoisseur; his own symphonic work was distinguished and original, but he was obliged to earn his daily bread creating musical pastiches. When outlining the music he wanted for specific scenes, Orson was quite a pasticheur himself; he sometimes behaved “almost as a precocious child,” Herrmann recalled, with “an instinctive, intuitive understanding of what should be done.” When Herrmann did not like one of Orson’s musical ideas, he would cross his arms, frown, and say, “I don’t know how I would do that . . .” Orson would trot out every means of persuasion he had: charm, negotiation, shouting, and cursing. But Herrmann knew those tactics; he used them himself. And while Welles was more musically literate than most nonmusicians, he loved being able to count on Herrmann’s superiority.

One of Welles’s essential characteristics as an artist, Herrmann recognized, was that “Orson was an improviser,” who never settled on “one way to do anything” but enjoyed tinkering right up to air time. For Herrmann, Orson’s creative, extemporaneous spirit made the mundane work of radio music far more stimulating. “At the start of every broadcast Orson was an unknown quantity,” Herrmann remembered. “As he went along his mood would assert itself and the temperature would start to increase till the point of incandescence. . . . Even when his shows weren’t good they were better than other people’s successes. . . . Horses’ hooves are horses’ hooves—yet they felt different with Orson—why? I think it had to do with the element of the unknown, the surprises, and the uncomfortable excitement of improvisation.

“He inspired us all—the musicians, the actors, the sound-effects men and the engineers. They’d all tell you they never worked on shows like Welles’s.”

Radio, Welles’s longtime associate Richard Wilson once observed, was “the only medium that imposed a discipline that Orson would recognize . . . and that was the clock.” The script, actors, sound effects, and music had to be ready for the live broadcast every Monday at 9
P
.
M
. The show had to start on time, and it had to fill a precise block of time. Otherwise the network signal would go dead from coast to coast.

On Monday, July 11, 1938, the Mercury Theatre went on the air for the first time. From one corner of the studio, Bernard Herrmann led the network orchestra of moonlighting symphony musicians in the series theme—the opening strains of Tchaikovsky’s lushly romantic Piano Concerto No. 1 in B Flat Minor. Wearing earphones, Orson raised his own baton as he stood in front of the main microphone on a podium in the middle of the room. He would preside grandly over the acting ensemble, twisting and gesticulating as he guided the actors’ pace and intensity; cueing the dialogue, sound effects, and music. Besides directing, narrating, and playing Dracula and Jonathan Harker, Orson voiced several smaller parts.

For the first time Welles signed off on a radio show in his own name and voice, supplying a brief valedictory to end the episode. From the first, his trademark sign-off was sly, and he was intimate with the invisible audience. “When you go to bed tonight, don’t worry,” he murmured, “put out the lights and go to sleep . . . (A wolf’s howl is heard.) It’s all right, you can rest peacefully, that’s just a sound effect . . . it’s nothing at all . . . I
think
it’s nothing . . .” As his voice faded, the genial host reminded viewers never to forget that vampires
do
exist.

Asked by Peter Bogdanovich which of the Mercury Theatre radio episodes he remembered as among the best, Orson replied quickly, “‘Dracula’ was a good one.”

The reviews were uniformly excellent.
Newsweek
pronounced it “adventurous” radio. “Luscious radio fare,” wrote syndicated radio columnist Richard Murray, with “Broadway’s boy wonder” and his Mercury cast “terrific. We think that Columbia deserves a whack on the back.”

On July 10, the day before the “Dracula” broadcast, the Mercury partners finally announced Orson’s choice for the new opening play of the fall season. Banishing the memory of Chubby Sherman, Orson replaced
The Importance of Being Earnest
with another turn-of-the-century French farce in the manner of
Horse Eats Hat.
His best friend in the company, Joseph Cotten, would perform the lead.

Originally, this farce, by Maurice Ordonneau, was called
La Plantation Thomassin
, but the actor-manager William Gillette had Americanized it, in 1894, into a breakneck comedy called
Too Much Johnson.
When Orson was a boy, Ashton Stevens had often regaled him with tales of Gillette, who was best known for touring in the role of Sherlock Holmes. (Gillette’s costume of deerstalker hat, cape, and curved pipe would forever fix the image of Holmes in the public imagination.) Gillette had died in 1937 near Stony Creek, Connecticut, where the Mercury company would mount an August tryout of his farce at the Stony Creek Playhouse, a summer stock theater. William Herz, who had served as Chubby Sherman’s casting assistant for the Mercury, had taken over management of the venerable playhouse, and several of the Mercury players had signed on for the summer.

Among them was Orson’s wife. At this juncture in their strained marriage, Virginia Welles adopted a stage name: “Anna Stafford.” Orson fooled himself into believing the couple had a mature “understanding” for the summer. Indeed, Virginia appears to have been carrying on her own side romances. In his unproduced script about
The Cradle Will Rock
, the
ORSON
character is tortured by the unwelcome presence in his life of an Irish sculptor, Kevan Kildare, a summer stock actor with aspirations. “A sexy young man,”
VIRGINIA
calls
KILDARE
; the script describes him as “startlingly beautiful,” with “something of an early Brando” in his persona. The man of the household suspects
KILDARE
, who is moonlighting as an ice sculptor at his Sneden’s Landing parties, of pursuing
VIRGINIA
.

Too Much Johnson
was a similar pinwheel of furtive lovemaking and mistaken identity. The plot follows a philandering New York lawyer (Joseph Cotten’s role) who is chased to Cuba by his mistress’s vengeful husband. The philanderer, who adopts the name “Johnson”—its phallic innuendo is part of the running joke—is beguiled by a fresh beauty on the island, and finds his fate intertwined with another “Johnson.”

For his production of the farce, Orson came up with another of his Big Ideas: he would turn
Too Much Johnson
into a half-film, half-play. To introduce each of the three acts, Orson would direct a set of three filmed slapstick sequences featuring the same actors in the play; projected onto a screen, accompanied by live sound effects and music, the filmed sequences would entertain theatergoers until the live actors burst onstage and picked up the story as though they’d leaped out of the screen.

Moving swiftly, Orson had a pile of editing equipment hauled into his St. Regis suite and threw himself into the hybrid production. Everything always seemed to happen simultaneously with Orson: the script, casting, the first rehearsals, the plans for filming. He offered his wife the plum part of the pretty mail-order bride in Cuba, while drawing most of the rest of the cast from Mercury regulars and friends. Besides the devil-may-care Cotten, who had been so light and charming in
Horse Eats Hat
, as “Johnson,” Arlene Francis, also from
Hat
, would play the unfaithful wife caught in flagrante. The capable Broadway veteran Edgar Barrier, already on the Stony Creek roster, was hired to play the outraged cuckold. Erskine Sanford from
Heartbreak House
also took a supporting role. There were smaller parts for Orson’s “slave” Richard Wilson and for Mercury actresses Ruth Ford and Mary Wickes; Wickes was also persuaded to put a little of her family money into the production. Orson sprinkled the cast with old-time vaudevillians like pratfall specialist Howard Smith, who amused him endlessly. (When Orson told Smith to sit down in a scene, Smith asked whether he wanted the “Fast Sit” or the “Slow Sit.”)

Pulling together a team that included technical director Jean Rosenthal and production manager Walter Ash from the Mercury staff, Orson commandeered a midtown screening room and invited people to watch Mack Sennett comedies such as
Love, Honor and Behave
and
The Lion and the Girl
, along with Chaplin’s
The Kid.
Orson and his creative team trooped over to the Paramount-Strand to watch Harold Lloyd’s new release,
Professor Beware.
Welles adored Lloyd and his masterwork,
Safety Last
, celebrated for the image of Lloyd dangling from a clock on a skyscraper. Orson considered it “one of the greatest, simplest films ever made.” Lloyd, another amateur magician, was passing through New York at the time, promoting his new picture, and Orson contrived to meet him at a private magicians’ club.

All this homework bolstered Orson’s ambition to shoot the film sections of
Too Much Johnson
as an homage to golden age comedy, with its daring physical stunts and intricate gags. He loved arguing about the relative merits of the great silent comedians—Lloyd, Chaplin, and Buster Keaton—but always insisted that Lloyd was “the greatest gagman in the history of the movies,” and disliked the vein of sentimentality in Chaplin’s work. He admired Keaton’s film
The General
, calling it “almost the greatest movie ever made,” and “the most poetic movie I’ve ever seen.”

To simulate the look of classic silent film, Welles needed a capable photographer, and in Harry Dunham he found a remarkable successor to William Vance, who had been the cameraman on
Hearts of Age
—and a precursor to Gregg Toland, who would be the cameraman on
Citizen Kane.
Paul Bowles, who was writing the music for
Too Much Johnson
, recommended Dunham. “A bit of a wild man,” in Bowles’s words, Dunham was born into affluence in Ohio and in 1931 graduated from Princeton, where he had appeared in drag in college theatricals. Later he briefly tried ballet in New York, where he befriended Bowles, pouring his inheritance into Bowles’s career. No one was ever quite sure if they were friends or lovers. (Both genders were attracted to the dashing Dunham.) Together Bowles and Dunham traveled through Morocco and lived in Paris, where they were part of the circle including André Gide, Man Ray, and Gertrude Stein. (Dunham even had a stint as Stein’s dog washer.)