Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (77 page)

After first reciting the funeral oration from
Julius Caesar
—set as the first broadcast of the fall season—Orson turned to bookmarked pages in several classics:
Jane Eyre
,
Oliver Twist
,
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. He read the excerpts “with deep feeling and great variety,” in Houseman’s words, “until the hour was up and he was able to sign off.” The last thing Orson did was announce that
The Mercury Theatre on the Air
(as the series was now officially renamed) was moving to Sunday nights at 8
P
.
M
., with the first new show to be broadcast in five days, on September 11.

Houseman’s frequent references to Orson’s affair with the “celebrated ballerina” reflected his belief that Welles was distracted, overextended, even self-destructive. He thought that Welles’s frivolous affair with Vera Zorina was ongoing, and that it would persist for months to come. Evidence available today, however, suggests that when the summer of
Too Much Johnson
and the first season of the Mercury Theater radio series ended, Orson’s involvement with Zorina ended with it.

Was Zorina really a lover or was she more of a soul mate, someone who admired Welles without hesitation, a woman to whom he could pour out his heart? Was their friendship more of an escape than a hot, dangerous distraction? Were his boasts about the romance merely an elaborate misdirection by a man devoted more to his artistic pursuits than to his sex life?

The telegrams preserved by Zorina in her archives suggest that the two carried on a passionate yet idealistic flirtation not unlike Orson’s fling with Tilly Losch. The first telegram Welles sent Zorina is dated shortly after they met, around Christmas 1937, when he was in Chicago and she was in California:

HAVE
NEVER
WANTED
DELIBERATELY
TO
HURT
STOP
TROUBLE
WAS
THAT
IN
GENERAL
CONFUSION
TRIED
TO
PLEASE
TOO
MANY
PEOPLE
I
WARNED
YOU
I
WAS
DIFFICULT
BUT
PLEASE
BELIEVE
MY
GOOD
INTENTIONS
AND
ONCE
AGAIN
FORGIVE
MY
INCONSISTENCE
AND
BAD
ACTION
. He signed it with a pun:
OCEAN
.

Usually terse, the telegrams proliferated in the spring of 1938. The messages run the gamut from the one-word
YES
(from Orson to Zorina at the Imperial Theatre on April 7), to
I
LOVE
YOU
I
LOVE
YOU
I
LOVE
YOU
I
LOVE
YOU
I
LOVE
YOU
I
LOVE
YOU
I
LOVE
YOU
I
LOVE
YOU
(undated, unsigned). Welles ran out of the auditorium between the acts of her Broadway play, sending her telegrams to praise her performance in each act; he sent her telegrams when he knew she was asleep, wishing her sweet dreams; he sent her telegrams saying simply
I
AM
ACROSS
THE
STREET
. Most of his telegrams ended with the professions of love that came easily to him and that concluded many of his letters to friends of either gender.

A few actual letters saved by Zorina bared Orson’s soul more painfully. “I have many, many troubles and I feel awful and I need you,” he wrote to her at the Ritz in September 1938.

The next letter, later in the fall, is among the last items in the correspondence she saved.

“Dearest,” Orson wrote, “For a time at least, I am afraid I have no more to offer you than my unhappiness.

“So when I come to you again it will be only when my life is such that there can be no misunderstandings.

“You are a wonderful and truly great woman.

“You are my own love.

“I have told you these things before and you have not believed me.

“I cannot hope you will ever entirely understand.

“Always, O.”

Zorina herself insisted that she and Orson never moved beyond hand-holding and ardent embraces. Zorina “admired him enormously,” she wrote in her autobiography, and for a fleeting moment in 1938 she did experience “all the symptoms of having fallen head over heels in love” with a man “as imaginative in love as in the theater. On days when we did not meet he bombarded me with telegrams, spaced to arrive every few hours.” Yet their relationship was destined to remain “platonic and short-lived,” Zorina wrote. “Orson was married, and though we never talked about it, I understood that there were problems.”

Women have been known to speak coyly about their out-of-wedlock lovers—yet Zorina confessed openly to other such entanglements, writing candidly about her involvement, at age eighteen, in a London ménage à trois with choreographer Léonide Massine and his wife, Eugenia Delarova. Her platonic relationship with Orson was deeply gratifying, Zorina wrote in her memoir, but within months of their “breakup,” on the day before Christmas 1938, she married her choreographer, George Balanchine.

Meanwhile, Orson still promoted his wife’s professional acting career. “Anna Stafford” had performed credibly in
Too Much Johnson
and other plays at Stony Creek. Now Orson cast Virginia in another small but noticeable role, as Julie, Danton’s wife, in
Danton’s Death
, the Mercury’s fall opener. Orson no longer needed a hotel suite for his asthma, or for editing the footage of
Too Much Johnson
, so when Virginia found a spacious apartment on West Fifty-Ninth Street, close to the Mercury, Orson moved back in with her and five-month-old Christopher, giving family life another try as he prepared
Danton’s Death.

The Mercury radio series had soared to impressive heights during its first season, but the Mercury Theatre’s stage operation was plummeting toward insolvency. After months of expenditures with no substantial return, the partners had to start from scratch in raising money for their second Broadway season. Fund-raising was neither man’s forte. Welles wanted as little as possible to do with the money side of the Mercury, except for spending as he desired, and Houseman, by his own account, was forced to rely on emergency infusions from his upper-crust friends, or from surprise investors blowing in without warning.

For both men, outward gratitude toward their deep-pocketed benefactors conflicted with underlying resentment. Both felt like children reliant on stern parents, and for Orson “those emotions were so intense as to make it virtually impossible for him to be civil to [investors] on the rare occasions when he encountered them,” according to Houseman.

Budgeting for the Mercury still fell to Houseman, and it was his most important job. Wary of returning to their few original stockholders, he planned to raise funds from fresh investors for the 1938–1939 season with a scheme that spread the risks over the company’s three envisioned productions, promising a share of 50 percent of the overall profits to the participants. He estimated that
Danton’s Death
and
Too Much Johnson
would cost $10,000 each, with another $10,000 required for the Mercury’s share of the entire cost of the more expensive
Five Kings
, which Houseman had leveraged as a Theatre Guild coproduction.

Preoccupied with radio scripts, Houseman, by his own admission, neglected fund-raising. By the summer’s end he had amassed only several thousand dollars, including $2,000 pried out of “a bootlegger’s son from Brooklyn” on a promise that he could work on the Mercury radio series. But “for all our triumphs,” Houseman recalled, the Mercury “remained an ‘art theatre’—poison to the smart money and the regular Broadway angels.” By chance, in September, the Mercury bank account was suddenly boosted by $10,000 from “the most hardboiled outfit in show business,” a producing syndicate run by Marcus Hyman and Max Gordon that put a little money into various shows. “I never quite understood why they did it,” said Houseman.

Seventeen thousand dollars was all the Mercury had, starting out its second season. Before salvaging
Too Much Johnson
, it had to mount
Danton’s Death
, its biggest, most difficult, perhaps least commercially attractive production yet. The theater building would have to stay dark until the premiere, optimistically announced for late September, as the partners poured out money to pay for sets, costumes, lighting, and the salaries of the returning staff and actors. Low on cash and without any revenue stream, they had to work fast and cheap and hope to succeed wildly.

Notoriously complicated—for both stage companies and audiences—Georg Büchner’s 1835 play was set during a lull in the French Revolution and revolved around events leading up to the guillotining of Danton, a disillusioned advocate of the death-dealing revolutionary Tribunal. It had found its way onto the schedule, according to Mercury lore, when actor Martin Gabel brought a volume of Büchner’s collected plays to a July radio rehearsal, urging Orson to read
Danton’s Death
and consider it as a vehicle for Gabel in the title role.

But Orson was already familiar with
Danton’s Death
for a number of reasons. His paramour Tilly Losch had choreographed a famous German-language production of
Dantons Tod
for Max Reinhardt in New York in 1927. The celebrated and hugely influential Reinhardt, whose plays Orson had seen as a boy on his first trip to Europe, was a recurrent topic of conversation with both Losch and Vera Zorina, who also had danced for Reinhardt. Although he never mentioned it in any of his interviews, Orson may well have seen the New York production of
Dantons Tod
, which occurred during the period when he regularly visited the city with his father.

After agreeing to
Danton’s Death
, Houseman was taken aback to learn that Orson was going to let Gabel play the larger-than-life Danton. Houseman was convinced that the character’s “heroism, magnanimity, lethargy, and great personal magnetism” were better suited for Orson (who was also the bigger marquee name). At least that’s how Houseman told the story; Welles told Henry Jaglom that it was Houseman who preferred Gabel as Danton. “Houseman kept saying, ‘These plays are not vehicles for you. Remember, we’re an ensemble company, not the Orson Welles Players,’ ” he claimed. Either way, the partners argued about the casting, as they often did, with Orson ultimately prevailing, as was usually the case, after pointing out (“not unreasonably,” in Houseman’s words) that he couldn’t very well play Danton, and later in the season alternate as Falstaff in
Five Kings
, while directing both of the plays and also guiding the radio series.

They agreed to an “unsatisfactory compromise,” with Orson accepting the “brief but flashy” role of Saint-Just, a ruthless ally of Robespierre—they were both champions of the guillotine—in which role Welles could be “replaced without damage when the
Five Kings
rehearsals began or,” as Houseman liked to add, sneaking in another mention, “whenever the ballerina summoned him.”

Gabel was thrilled, George Coulouris not so much. It was bad enough that Gabel had been anointed as Mark Antony in
Julius Caesar.
Now Gabel (whom Coulouris considered his inferior) was being placed on an even higher pedestal as the titular lead of the Mercury’s second season opener. Coulouris resented the snub—and the likely pay cut. When Houseman instead offered him the role of Robespierre, Coulouris “took it coolly,” and a few days later turned the role down as “monolithic and the play turgid.” Houseman angrily told him to go to hell, and Coulouris left the stage company indefinitely. To replace him, Orson contacted the Russian-born Vladimir Sokoloff, who had been Reinhardt’s Robespierre in the earlier German-language production, and Sokoloff agreed to return to New York to re-create his role.

Coulouris was a major defection, but a few stalwarts from the original Mercury ensemble helped preserve continuity. Besides Virginia Welles (still billed as “Anna Stafford” in the program), the cast of
Danton’s Death
included trustworthy Joseph Cotten as the politician Barrère and Arlene Francis as Danton’s friend Marion, a prostitute. (Francis and Martin Gabel would fall in love during the long rehearsals, and they later married.) Featured parts went to Erskine Sanford, Edgar Barrier, Eustace Wyatt, Guy Kingsley, Ruth Ford, and Mary Wickes, all from the summer tryout of
Too Much Johnson.
Also back in the troupe were former Todd boys William Mowry Jr. and Edgerton Paul, and three “slaves”—William “Vakhtangov” Alland, Richard Wilson, and Richard Baer.

Marc Blitzstein also returned to compose an imaginative score for “voices, clarinet, trumpet, percussion and piano/harpsichord,” according to his biographer Howard Pollack. The music included arrangements of three famous revolutionary-era tunes (“Ah! ça ira,” “La Carmagnole” and “La Marseillaise”) and two original songs, including a “folkish number,” sung by Cotten and Wickes, with lyrics adapted from Büchner. Another familiar behind-the-scenes contributor was technical director Jean Rosenthal, who would oversee the design and lighting by Stephen Jan Tichacek, a veteran of the Federal Theatre Project.

Danton’s Death
called for hundreds of extras, but Orson proposed a budget-minded alternative: a background cyclorama of masks that would evoke the faces of the bloodthirsty mob of the revolution. Rosenthal purchased a slew of buckram masks—accounts put the number anywhere from 1,700 to 5,000—and had them colored by hand and glued to a curved wall of canvas enveloping the back of the stage. As Orson’s brainstorms often did, the hydra-headed wall caused headaches in other departments, requiring the creation of an elaborate lighting scheme that would allow the faces to be illuminated when needed, but hidden from view when the mob was not supposed to be present. Individually controlled lights were scattered throughout the auditorium, each numbered and with a dimmer, shining onto the stage from the front balcony, the boxes, the ceiling, the pipes behind the proscenium, and along and behind the cyclorama covering the back wall. Speaking with Peter Bogdanovich decades later, Welles readily admitted that his lighting schemes for Mercury productions were “tremendously complicated,” with
Danton’s Death
the most, or worst, complicated—“over 350 cues.”