Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (82 page)

The Campbell Playhouse
was off and running—fast. “A good start,” the
New York Times
radio columnist wrote, if “marred by too many commercial interruptions.” A few months later, when Louis Reid reviewed the first months of weekly broadcasts in the high-toned
Saturday Review of Literature
, he hailed “the fabulous Orson Welles” as “a radio dramatic talent of an unusually high order” who had raised the intelligence quotient for “the armchair audience.”

Orson never made so much money having so much fun. At this low point of the Mercury Theatre, and many other times in years ahead, radio paid untold dividends, and not only financially. Years later, during a long discussion of screen acting (“You shouldn’t play
to
the camera at all,” Orson insisted), Peter Bogdanovich asked Welles how he rated radio as an acting medium.

“I was happy in it, Peter,” Welles responded quickly and unambiguously, “the happiest I’ve ever been as an actor. It’s so . . . what do I want to say, impersonal? No,
private.

“It’s as close as you can get, and still get paid for it, to the great private joy of singing in the bathtub. The microphone’s a friend, you know. The camera’s a critic.”

John Houseman did not share his partner’s happiness. In his memoir, he complained that after the premiere of
The Campbell Playhouse
the grunt work was left to him, director Paul Stewart, writer Howard Koch, and “a flock of slaves and piece workers,” while Orson gave orders, took bows, and then flew back to the Midwest to toil away mysteriously on
Five Kings.

CHAPTER 16

December 1938–July 1939

“I Had a Lot of Fun”

Five Kings
was fated to be the great white whale that Orson chased across miles and years. From its first incarnation at the Todd School, through the ill-fated Mercury Theatre production of 1939 and several makeshift stage and radio versions, climaxing with his 1966 film
Chimes at Midnight
—“perhaps the greatest adaptation of Shakespeare that the cinema has yet produced,” in the words of scholar Dudley Andrew—Orson, like Ahab, pursued his Moby Dick obsessively.

Between his flights back and forth to New York, he camped out at the Todd School in early December, working on his script and staging plans for the marathon Shakespeare production. With the New Year fast approaching, the Theatre Guild’s agreement with the Mercury Theatre, which stipulated the dates for out-of-town tryouts before a Broadway opening in the latter half of the 1938–1939 season, dictated full speed.

Welles returned to New York in time for the December 23 radio show, “A Christmas Carol,” in which he played both Tiny Tim and Ebenezer Scrooge. Lionel Barrymore had traditionally performed the holiday classic on radio for Christmas Day, and Orson had announced during the “Rebecca” broadcast that Barrymore would play Scrooge for
The Campbell Playhouse
this year. But Barrymore, fighting an illness, dropped out of the broadcast, giving Orson his blessing to go ahead without him. Orson would give the eminent actor another chance the next Christmas.

Orson presented radio adaptations of Dickens’s stories as often as those of any author. And while he was generally averse to sentimentality in his plays and films, he loved the Christmas spirit and would produce many Christmas broadcasts over the years. He and the Mercury players offered a “Christmas Carol” of great warmth and atmosphere, featuring Joseph Cotten as Fred, Scrooge’s nephew and only living relative; and Virginia Welles as Belle, the lost love of Scrooge’s past.

For the final show of 1938, Orson joined Katharine Hepburn in a December 30 broadcast version of Ernest Hemingway’s World War I novel
A Farewell to Arms.
(Perhaps Hemingway wasn’t so horrified by Welles after all.)

In the week between “A Christmas Carol” and “A Farewell to Arms,” Orson used the ballroom of the Claridge Hotel on Times Square to finalize the casting of
Five Kings.

Back in June, Orson had chosen a Mercury Theatre newcomer, Burgess Meredith, to play the young Prince Hal, who would become King Henry V. After making his debut in Eva Le Gallienne’s 1930 production of
Romeo and Juliet
, Meredith had become one of Broadway’s most admired young actors. He and Orson were friendly whenever their paths crossed. In late spring, just as Meredith was about to sail abroad after a painful divorce, Orson wined and dined him to discuss the lead in
Five Kings.
Orson was “one of the most persuasive and entertaining males I ever knew,” Meredith recalled. Welles brought him to Sneden’s Landing and set him up with “a lovely French girl who made me forget my marital troubles,” Meredith remembered, and even hired a five-man Harlem band to serenade him as he boarded his ship for Paris. The contract Meredith signed gave him top billing and a paycheck above Orson’s—a reported $1,000 weekly.

Almost as good a catch was the tall, dashing John Emery, who agreed to portray Hotspur, Prince Hal’s rival. Otherwise known (unfairly) as “Tallulah Bankhead’s husband,” Emery came from a distinguished English theatrical family who had graced the stage since the early eighteenth century. Gifted with a lustrous voice, Emery had played several significant Shakespearean roles, including Laertes to John Gielgud’s Hamlet on Broadway in 1936. Both Emery and Burgess Meredith had also figured prominently in the 1935 revival of
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
starring Katharine Cornell.

Welles also ranged outside the established Mercury ensemble for other principal characters. As Henry IV, he cast Morris Ankrum, whose Illinois background gave him a foot in the door with Orson. Welles fondly remembered Ankrum, a veteran of Broadway and Hollywood Westerns, from the road show of
The Green Goddess
, a thriller he’d seen in Chicago as a boy in the fall of 1922. An actress and playwright, Margaret Curtis, was engaged to portray Princess Catherine, the French consort of Henry V. Robert Speaight, a longtime poetry recitalist and a Shakepearean with a powerful voice, had created the role of Archbishop Thomas Becket in T. S. Eliot’s celebrated verse drama
Murder in the Cathedral
; Orson gave him the important role of the Chorus in
Five Kings
, a part that would combine the plays’ narrative prologues with selections from Holinshed’s
Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland
to knit the play’s sections together.

Gus Schilling, one of the burlesque comedians Orson palled around with, was brought on board to play Prince Hal’s friend from his wild youth, the former soldier, thief, and coward Bardolph. Orson also found a role for “Mrs. Schilling,” though some doubt that she and Schilling were married: a stripper usually billed as “The Ball of Fire,” her name was Betty Rowland, and she would play the knife-wielding prostitute Doll Tearsheet, one of Falstaff’s companions at the Boar’s Head Tavern.

Orson cast Mercury players Edgar Barrier as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Guy Kingsley as Gloucester, Eustace Wyatt as Northumberland, Erskine Sanford as the Lord Chief Justice, and William Mowry Jr. as the King of France. Stage and radio regulars George Duthie, Frank Readick, Francis Carpenter, Edgerton Paul, John Berry, William Herz, William Alland, Richard Wilson, and Richard Baer helped fill out the sizable cast.

“All of a sudden, the Mercury Theatre has come to life,” the
New York Times
reported excitedly on December 29, 1938. After
Five Kings
, the Mercury partners told the press, both
Too Much Johnson
and the rumored new Marc Blitzstein musical were in the hopper.

By this time, the casting was nearly complete, and after the New Year Orson launched the first read-throughs and rehearsals. The Welles family moved into an apartment on Fifty-Seventh Street, near the East River, and Orson let his beard grow for Falstaff. Boston would host the first out-of-town performance, but the marathon Shakespeare play would touch down in several other cities before its scheduled February opening on Broadway—a tight deadline set months earlier by John Houseman and the Theatre Guild, which sold advance tickets to subscribers.

Welles returned from his sabbatical in Woodstock with a vision for staging
Five Kings
on a huge revolving platform that would occupy almost the entire stage, shifting scenes and actors from castle to tavern to battlefield without blackouts or interruptions. “Again,” Jean Rosenthal wrote, “Orson was startlingly lucid about what he wanted and how it should look.” James Morcom, who had worked on the abortive
Too Much Johnson
, was handed the daunting task of the scenic design. Rosenthal would supervise the lighting and technical effects. Millia Davenport returned for the costuming, codpieces and all. Back in the spring, Virgil Thomson had been hired to compose music for
Five Kings
, but he had given up waiting for a script and left for Paris. The assignment was handed to Aaron Copland, who knew Orson from
The Second Hurricane.
For $1,000 plus royalties—which he would never see—Copland wrote incidental music for voices and chamber ensemble (including a Hammond organ), enhancing the production’s “period flavor” by drawing on “English and French folk songs, traditional sacred music, and [Guillame] Dufay and [Jean-Baptiste] Lully,” according to Copland’s biographer Howard Pollack.

The deal Houseman had struck with the Theatre Guild gave the Mercury creative autonomy and a $30,000 investment from the Guild in what the producer had projected as the $40,000 budget needed for
Five Kings.
As Houseman conceded in his memoir, however, he had bluffed about the budget ceiling and, at the time of the deal, he had no idea of the production’s scope.

“The two things they kept asking me were how long the performance would run—to which I had no answer—and how we expected to produce a hundred thousand dollar show for forty thousand dollars,” Houseman remembered. “Since my estimate was based on the wildest of guesses, I could only reply that the Mercury had its own way of doing things.”

Moreover, the rehearsals began when the Mercury was “without a cent in the bank and still owing money on
Danton
,” according to Houseman. The Guild demanded a good faith deposit toward the Mercury’s $10,000 share of staging costs, and Houseman had to extract “several thousand dollars” from a loyal stockholder. Never a gifted fund-raiser, Houseman was now a weary one. Too long had he stood in Orson’s shadow. While the producer described his behind-the-scenes manipulation of funds as “ingenious and tricky,” this was the last money he managed to magic.

The sets had to be constructed in available space, while Orson rehearsed his magnum opus in “various empty stages” the Guild rented on behalf of the Mercury, in Houseman’s words. The director ranted and raged over the accommodations. (“Not without reason,” recalled Houseman. “For if ever a play needed ideal physical conditions to rehearse in, this was it.”) Once the rehearsals were under way, and the carpenters went to work on the set, the clock started ticking. Everything had to go according to schedule because the money spigot was turned on for materials and salaries.

Orson did not like being confined by schedules, and he always resisted being pinned down on his rounds. Fridays were inviolate—they belonged to the
Campbell
radio show—but he vanished at other times, forcing the company to wait for him before starting rehearsals, or to carry on under the direction of subordinates. In the second week of January, for example, Orson flew to Chicago for a Monday lecture at Orchestra Hall for Northwestern University, a lucrative engagement that would help defray the costs of
Five Kings.
He also appeared at several benefits for charities and liberal causes, emceeing at an auction of rare books to benefit writers and artists exiled from fascist nations (donating to the auction his director’s copy of the “War of the Worlds” script, inscribed with doodles of Martians). Houseman often was the last to know Orson’s whereabouts, and in his memoir the producer complains vociferously about Welles’s extracurricular activities but never mentions Orson’s busy schedule of public events in the first half of 1939.

The
Five Kings
rehearsals, which again the producer attended only fitfully (“I was made to feel uneasy and unwelcome”), were “undisciplined and desultory from the start,” Houseman wrote decades later. He heard “increasingly disturbing” reports from people—“Houseman people”—about their progress.

“Some came from the directors of the Theatre Guild,” Houseman remembered. “Orson had announced that he did not want them at rehearsal; when either of them defied this interdiction, a bottle of scotch, especially kept for that purpose, was produced and Orson would call a break and entertain the cast with jokes and anecdotes until he or she had withdrawn.”

Orson did enjoy telling stories at the beginning of the rehearsals, or during a break, to enliven the company’s mood and establish his control over the proceedings. By Houseman’s account, he was such a “prolific raconteur” that he often delayed rehearsals with long whoppers about himself and his boyhood, and “fantasies that were invented on the spot out of sheer exuberance or to cover up some particularly outrageous piece of behavior.” One time, Houseman wrote, Welles arrived “more than two hours late” for a rehearsal, wearing an extravagant dinner jacket, and regaled everyone with the yarn of his hair’s-breadth escape from “a celebrated gangster” whose wife he had romanced in Harlem, before fleeing his lover with the gangster “and his torpedoes in hot pursuit.” Two of Orson’s “slaves” had to be deputized to guard the building, Houseman added.