Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (83 page)

Houseman had begun to view Orson as a “Champagne Charley,” given to behavior of “growing wildness” and “conspicuous extravagance.” His every meal was “a feast,” Houseman remembered, “his consumption of alcohol between one and two bottles of whisky or brandy a night; for his new apartment, which had a living room the size of a skating rink, he acquired furniture so huge that it had to be hoisted by a crane through the double windows; his sexual prowess, which he was inclined to report in full statistical detail, was also, apparently, immense.”

Houseman thought the challenge of
Five Kings
intimidated Welles. It presented the specter of “
Danton
all over again,” the Mercury producer wrote, “and with a lot more alcohol . . . he seemed unable to organize either his material or himself,” adding pointedly, “This time I was of little help to him.”

With growing jealousy and resentment, Houseman had read Russell Maloney’s extensive profile of Welles in the October 8, 1938, issue of the
New Yorker
, part of the avalanche of publicity that preceded the opening of
Danton’s Death.
The
Time
cover story on Orson had referred politely to Houseman as running the “business end” of the Mercury; now the
New Yorker
described Orson as the “inspiration” behind the company. Houseman had his own artistic aspirations, and he was frustrated by this public portrait of Orson as the artistic wellspring and himself as the Mercury’s business mind—when he knew better than anyone else that the business side of the company was a mess.

The
New Yorker
profile was one of the first lengthy features to dwell on Orson’s boyhood, with passages about his father, characterized as “one of the oddest souls ever to come out of the Middle West.” Full of rewritten publicity language and Dr. Bernstein’s hand-me-down tales (“[Dick Welles] invented one of the first automobiles in America, but never bothered about patents because the thing seemed impractical,” wrote Maloney), the profile depicted Orson as a boy in thrall to his father, “vicariously” sampling the “wine, women and song” of Europe, the Far East and “Dixon, Illinois,” where the article inaccurately located the Hotel Sheffield. The profile reinforced Houseman’s sense that Orson behaved so extravagantly because his father’s example haunted him, and that Orson was subconsciously compelled to imitate his father’s path to self-destruction.

“Much of what he had accomplished so precociously had been done out of a furious need to prove himself in the eyes of a man who was no longer there to see it,” Houseman wrote years later. “Now that success had come, in quantities and of a kind that his father had never dreamed of, this conflict, far from being assuaged, seemed to grow more intense and consuming.” Simon Callow took this idea a step further, saying that it took “no trained psychologist to recognize the figure of Richard Head Welles” in the character Orson chose to play in
Five Kings
: Falstaff, famous as “a drunkard, a trickster, a braggart, a womanizer.” Charles Higham claimed that Orson’s womanizing was one key reason he “seemed to have lost control” during the rehearsals for
Five Kings
, his many affairs “further dissipating his energies.”

In
Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles
, David Thomson praised Houseman for “concentrating on the radio shows so that Welles could do
Five Kings
,” and claimed that Welles “was going on memory of the plays alone. He had little notion of the dramatic properties of the text he had adapted himself.” And his absences didn’t help: according to Callow, Orson “simply stayed away for a great deal of the allocated five weeks” of rehearsal, employing one of his slaves, Richard Baer, as a stand-in while he sneaked away with Burgess Meredith, the two rascals “roaring their way through the night in various dives and various arms.” “There was no script,” wrote Callow. “There had been no read-through; no one had seen the complete adaptation, for the good reason that there wasn’t one.”

If there was madness in Orson’s behavior, there was also method.

There is no end to the negatives in the accounts by Houseman, Callow, and others—and yet, somehow, despite Orson’s supposed dissipation, and the alleged lack of a workable script, the
Five Kings
company made it to the Colonial Theatre in Boston in February. All of Orson’s tall tales; his late-night carousing; and his bonding, like Falstaff, with his chosen Prince Hal—these may also have been clever bits of strategy, a kind of Method approach to directing.

Once in Boston, Orson carried on with the rehearsals in lobbies and cellars while waiting for the crew to install the massive rotating scenery onstage: “towering” and “impressionistic rather than realistic,” in the words of one Boston correspondent, “built of plain, unpainted boards, roughly nailed together.” The complicated lighting had to be hung and tested (“perhaps the biggest power plant ever installed on a theatre stage,” reported the
Boston Globe
). The array of dangerous props included huge mortars, real gunpowder, and flaming arrows.

With such ambitious staging came the inevitable problems. The rotating stage platform was supposed to move as the actors marched around the stage alongside it, revealing the next setting. But the platform was as troublesome as the huge elevator in
Danton’s Death
: it rotated ponderously, when it turned at all, and when they tried accelerating it, the apparatus had a nasty habit of throwing itself into reverse, hurling off chunks of scenery that landed in the orchestra pit. The front rows were blanketed with noxious smoke and gunpowder fumes during the fight scenes; the flaming arrows went astray, threatening to cause a blaze. After rehearsing for long, stressful hours with the actors, Orson sent them home to bed, then worked even later hours with the crew trying to solve one technical foul-up after another.

When the cast joined the scenery onstage—with the actors still uncertain, and the sets and the props still misbehaving—the production seemed hopelessly unwieldy and chaotic. But a
Boston Globe
reporter who watched hours of the rehearsals came away with no doubt as to who would win the war of wills. “Orson Welles,” read the headline of the Sunday feature, “Is an Amazing Personality, with Limitless Energy, Startling Audacity, Bombast, Patience, and Humor.”

After three days of nonstop rehearsals, however, Welles decided it was best to postpone the much-ballyhooed opening. “I explained to Orson, as I had frequently over the past month,” Houseman recalled, “that we were now involved in the commercial big time with the Theatre Guild subscription involving tens of thousands of people and specific theatre bookings.” Welles swore at Houseman (“in that moment I was his father and every other enemy he had ever known”), then tore a phone off a nearby wall and threw it at him. “Such scenes,” Houseman wrote later, “took place almost daily during the final agony of
Five Kings.”

While every scene had been rehearsed, the company still had yet to run through the entire script of
Five Kings
continuously from start to finish. (The
Richards
, originally intended to be produced simultaneously for a two-night show, had long since been deferred.) Several days before the scheduled February 27 premiere, Orson launched the first public preview. The stage platform groaned into action, then ground to a halt. Orson had to commandeer several dozen Harvard students, who had been invited to fill the preview seats, to rush “to the cellar and push the stage around by hand,” as Burgess Meredith recalled. Supplied with beer to keep them happy, the students did a sometimes too enthusiastic job, with the unfortunate effect that “the loudest voices in the house” were coming not from the stage, as Meredith remembered, but from the cellar, shouting “Push! Pull! Forward! Halt!” The run-through went on for several hours, with interruptions for mishaps and miscues and lighting and technical fixes. The same thing happened when Theresa Helburn, a Theatre Guild official, attended another
Five Kings
rehearsal before the premiere, smiling patiently through the “first few hours.” The set “was impressive,” Houseman wrote, “and the transitions looked as though it might work.” At 3
A
.
M
., though, they had still not gotten to the closing lines.

Orson loved impossibilities. He never lost hope. He counted on luck and genius—of all sorts. “How’d we get ourselves into this frigging nightmare?” Burgess Meredith asked his director on the night of the official Boston opening. “Don’t worry,” replied Welles, as he calmly donned his suit of rubber padding, gray wig, beard enhancements, greasy rags, and heeled boots to play the elderly man-mountain Sir John Falstaff. “There is a thing called theater magic—it’s here—wait and see! Now take this pill. It’s potent. It’s called Benzedrine.”

The curtain ascended for
Five Kings.
Apart from being lowered twice for brief intermissions, it stayed aloft for four and a half hours—until thirty minutes past midnight. Props went amok; actors bumped into scenery while searching in vain for their spotlights. But little of what went wrong onstage mattered to “a crowded audience, representative of the city’s highest culture in play patronage,” as the
Boston Globe
reported, which “was present and followed with courteous, if not always rapt attention.” Led by actress Gertrude Lawrence and her troupe, on a night off from their
Susan and God
tour, the audience offered “tremendous” applause and a dozen ovations ending with Orson’s “brief speech of grateful acknowledgment.”

The
New York Times
closely followed the out-of-town tryout, reporting a “mixed” reaction among Boston reviewers. The
Times
cited one prominent local critic who found the marathon Bard ponderous and dull. But the city’s two most important newspapers—the
Globe
and the
Herald
—championed
Five Kings.
“Stupendous,” “singularly novel,” “comprehensive and satisfying,” declared the
Globe.
“Most impressive and ambitious,” “long and spectacular,” “splendid,” and “brilliantly colored,” Elinor Hughes wrote in the
Boston Herald
, although she admitted that “the length of the play forced us to depart after the second intermission.”

The huge revolving set was impressive if cumbersome. (“Like Ol’ Man River,” wrote John K. Hutchens in the
Boston Evening Transcript
, “it threatens to engulf the show as it ‘still keeps rolling along.’ ”) The battle scenes—with cannons firing, arrows flying, broadswords and chain mail clashing in hand-to-hand struggle—were believable to the point of being frightening. All of it was wondrously enhanced, as the
Globe
reviewer wrote, by the production’s “amazing” lighting canopy.

Many cast members were singled out for commendation—including Welles, whose performance, as usual jelling at the eleventh hour, was hailed by the critics as the acting highlight of
Five Kings.
His meticulous makeup was “marvelously amusing and effective,” the
Globe
’s reviewer commented. “It seems incredible that so young a man could give so robust and mature a performance,” wrote the
Herald.
“He misses neither the slyness, the grossness, nor the good fellowship, yet in his downfall his unstressed pathos is most moving.”

One of Shakespeare’s favorite characters—he appears in three plays—Falstaff was also one of Orson’s. Shakespeare describes Falstaff as fat, arrogant, and cowardly, but the character is also comic and wise. “He is almost entirely a good man,” Welles told British television interviewer Leslie Megahey several decades later. “He is a gloriously life-affirming good man.” Although he himself was only twenty-three, Orson foresaw the wreck of old age and good intentions gone wrong in such a gloriously life-affirming man. He played Falstaff’s key scene, after Prince Hal ascends the throne, for sublime tragedy. Falstaff intends to exploit their friendship for privileges, but Prince Hal, now King Henry, rebukes him in front of his friends with a long, humiliating recitation of his bad habits. “I know thee not, old man!” the King declares, before leaving Falstaff alone onstage with Shallow, Pistol, and Bardolph.

In that moment, as Falstaff is forced to save face with lies, Orson turned toward the audience and stammered proudly through tears: “Well, he’s just saying that now . . .” Actor Martin Gabel, who attended the Boston premiere of
Five Kings
, said: “Not Henry Irving, not Beerbohm Tree, not anybody could have done this scene as effectively as Welles did it.” The same humiliation scene, in Welles’s later film
Chimes at Midnight
, is the highlight of that Shakespearean masterwork, and arguably also of Welles’s screen acting career.

Yet even its staunchest admirers allowed that the marathon production needed cutting and refinement. And within days of the premiere, Boston newspapers were reporting that Welles had “materially shortened the performance and it now ends at a reasonable hour. Scenes that were not of vital importance to the continuity of this condensation of Shakespeare’s
King Henry IV
, parts one and two, and
King Henry V
, have been eliminated, and the changing of the amazing settings has been speeded up.”

The changes would continue throughout the thronged two-week run in Boston, but neither Houseman nor the Theatre Guild team would be heartened by Welles’s public declaration, made to the
Boston Herald
and recycled in the
New York Times
, that it would take “at least a year” on the road before
Five Kings
could be presented on Broadway the way he wished to present it—with the
Richards
lagging far, far behind.

During the Boston run, Virginia Welles visited the Colonial Theater for two nights. John Houseman called the trip “a strange, sad attempt to recapture the past,” adding that “on the third morning she left for New York, and in due course, for Reno.” But Virginia was in Boston partly to help firm up a plan for “Anna Stafford” and other Mercury players to take over the Bass Rocks Theatre in Gloucester for the summer, much as they had done at Stony Creek the year before. After Boston, moreover, Virginia headed to a getaway with her parents in Palm Beach, Florida, and she would turn up at Orson’s side repeatedly in the first half of 1939. His letters to her make it clear that he believed they had reached a truce in their marriage. Reno and divorce did lie ahead, but only after further dramatic developments, and not for another year.