Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (85 page)

Stage manager Walter Ash had stayed behind in Philadelphia, watching over the scenery, costumes, and equipment until he received word of where to ship the stuff. On April 5 Welles telegraphed a pitiful surrender:

DEAR
WALTER
WE
HAVE
MORE
MONEY
TROUBLES
THAN
WE
DREAMT
STOP
THERE
IS
NO
LONGER
ANY
CHOICE
FOR
US
FIVE
KINGS
CANNOT
COME
IN
THIS
SPRING
OF
COURSE
IT
MUST
THIS
AUTUMN
STOP
TERRIBLY
SORRY
NOT
TO
HAVE
BETTER
NEWS
AND
NOT
TO
HAVE
BEEN
DEFINITE
BEFORE
NOW
STOP
PLEASE
UNDERSTAND
AND
COME
BACK
TO
US
AND
THANKS
WALTER
FOR
EVERYTHING

ALL
MY
LOVE
ORSON
.

All the production material was addressed to a New York warehouse—“seventeen tons” of it, according to Houseman. The storage charges would accumulate for the next twenty-plus years.

Welles was emotionally and physically drained. For the first time, during the
Five Kings
tour, the press had begun to remark on his drawn appearance and weight gain. In Washington, D.C., a newspaperman described him as “puffy,” and when Orson stepped off the train in Charleston, South Carolina, alone on Easter Sunday morning, a local reporter described him as “portly.” When he paid an emergency visit to a doctor in New York, on the Saturday before Easter, he was told that he needed a break from the grueling work and pressures, and that “if he didn’t take an immediate vacation of a few days, soon he would be forced to take one for a couple of years.”

With his wife, Virginia, in a hospital recovering from a routine procedure (or so Orson’s letters suggest), Welles followed his doctor’s orders and headed south. His Sneden’s Landing friends Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur often stayed at the elegant Villa Margherita in Charleston, where the writers had established a tradition of retreating for inspiration when they were stuck in the middle of a script. MacArthur and his wife, Helen Hayes, had just returned from a Jamaican vacation and were now spending the Easter weekend there before heading home to New York. In a letter to Virginia, Orson said he thought the celebrated actress, his onetime neighbor and a frequent guest on his radio shows, “looks better than I’ve ever seen her,” adding that it “makes me think how much my lovely wife needs and deserves the sun.”

“There were two trains coming south,” Welles told the local press, “one of them to Charleston. I got that one, because Charleston is the most beautiful city in America.” He remembered Charleston fondly from the Cornell tour three years before. “The people are different [here],” Orson said. “The first thing I did when I arrived here was to go to church. During the day I went to five parties. That isn’t the way to rest, is it?”

Initially at the train station, Orson was taken aback by the newsmen waiting for him and by their stream of questions about the “War of the Worlds” broadcast, which had taken place months before and was ancient history to him. “If your questions are to be about that, the interview will have to end now,” he snapped. (“He almost shuddered when the Martian invasion drama was mentioned,” one reporter observed.) Softening later, Orson met with the same newsmen. The local press saw him as a radio celebrity and was principally interested in “War of the Worlds”; he didn’t have to field a single question about
Five Kings.
Orson explained that nothing he could say could dispel people’s impression of the controversial broadcast and the ensuing panic, which had surprised him as much as anyone. “Anything I say will render me flippant in the minds of other people,” he said.

On the Monday following Easter, Welles said, he had “rented a book” and headed to the Middleton Place, a plantation with famous landscaped gardens, “to read and to rest. Tomorrow I am going to get another book and go to another garden.” He lunched more than once with Charlie MacArthur, who got Orson excited about his plans for a script telling the story of Gavrilo Princip, the young Bosnian assassin whose killing of Archduke Ferdinand triggered World War I. As they sat drinking mint juleps and brainstorming, MacArthur told Orson that the story could make either a play or, perhaps better, a film. With encouragement from Orson, MacArthur promised to start writing.

“It’s all pleasing but not restful,” Orson admitted in a letter to his wife. He attended the Dock Street Theater production of
The Beaux’ Strategem
and, accompanied by Atlanta attorney Henry A. Newman, another guest at the Villa, paid courtesy calls on local civic figures and personalities in the arts. “I know all this visiting sounds unlike me,” he wrote to Virginia. “I guess a vacation ought to make you feel as much unlike yourself as possible.” He addressed all his letters to “Dearest,” and invariably closed with “I love you.” In the letters he sounds genuinely warm toward Virginia: “I miss you,” he wrote. “Please don’t be blue in the hospital—and please get well sooner than you’re supposed to.”

On the Thursday following Easter, after several days of solitude to ponder the future, Orson flew back to New York.

With John Houseman busy on the Stephen Vincent Benét opera, Orson was alone in trying to salvage the future of
Five Kings.
He still needed to raise an extraordinary amount of money, but that wasn’t his only challenge: he also had to fight a rearguard action against nervous actors being tempted by job offers promising more stability and reliable pay.

Burgess Meredith, for one, was flooded with offers from other producers; he had spoken informally with Guthrie McClintic and Katharine Cornell about joining one of their planned late spring productions. For Welles, this was a double blow: Meredith was both a friend and an example to the other cast members. Orson begged Meredith to give him a little more time to dig up some money. John Emery, too, was worried enough that he began making inquiries to other producers. Besides Welles himself, Meredith and Emery were the production’s only real drawing cards. And how could
Five Kings
go on without its Prince Hal and Hotspur?

Orson announced that the show’s New York opening would have to be postponed—but only until the fall. He would not shave his beard, he vowed, until he played Falstaff on Broadway.

That was more than bluster. Welles intended to deplete his own trust fund to keep the show alive on the road in tryouts. Until now, he had enjoyed only limited access to his trust fund—he hardly even knew how much money it contained—but Orson had convinced himself that the bank would advance him a loan on the principal. But he still needed Dr. Maurice Bernstein’s cooperation, and his guardian was skeptical. Orson resolved to fly to Chicago to reassure Bernstein and then meet with the bankers. His powers of persuasion would carry the day.

Before he left New York, however, Orson agreed to make a screen test for RKO.

The studio was planning a remake of
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
, and officials were tempted by the idea of having Orson play the title role. Hollywood had grown more persistent, and earlier in the year, Welles had said no unequivocally when producer Sam Goldwyn dangled the part of Hindley, the enemy of Heathcliff, in
Wuthering Heights.
The reason he declined, reportedly, was that he also wanted to write and direct the picture—but the direction was already in the capable hands of William Wyler, and Hindley was hardly a leading role. Orson was still ambivalent about Hollywood. He still saw himself, first and foremost, as a man of the theater.

Victor Hugo’s Hunchback was tantalizing, however. One of Orson’s idols, Lon Chaney, had played the role magnificently in the silent era, and the part would appeal to any actor who relished makeup and metamorphosis. This time, the
New York Times
reported, “Welles has indicated that he may be willing to settle for less” than a writing and directing deal.

Of all the studios, RKO had become his most stubborn Hollywood suitor. The company’s new president, George J. Schaefer, had started out before World War I as secretary to the film pioneer Lewis J. Selznick, who was the father of agent Myron Selznick and producer David O. Selznick. Schaefer had risen through the sales and management ranks of Paramount in the first half of the 1930s, during which time he had paved the way for Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur to establish their own autonomous production unit on the Paramount lot. Schaefer had permitted the team to write and direct a series of quirky comedies that no other studio would have dared to bankroll. MacArthur spoke highly of Schaefer as a man who stuck to his word.

Schaefer specialized in marketing difficult and artistic films. He prided himself on familiarity with smaller theater chains, on knowing, for example, the difference between audiences that could be expected to attend one theater in Boston, and those at another theater across town. After a few years at United Artists, where he expanded the company’s relationships with independent producers, Schaefer had assumed the leadership of the struggling RKO in October 1938. He was moving aggressively to attract new talent, giving top directors such as Howard Hawks and John Ford leeway on pet projects, hoping their films would raise the studio’s profile artistically and commercially. His first meeting with Orson was probably in April in New York, when Schaefer was back east to testify routinely in front of a U.S. Senate subcommittee. Welles, to his own surprise, liked Schaefer in person: he was a pure businessman, like Orson’s father, and a man’s man who loved sailing, like Roger Hill. Schaefer liked Welles, too, and—after receiving encouraging memos from RKO’s New York staff—took a personal interest in recruiting him. He watched Orson’s screen test for
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
with interest.

The impasse with
Five Kings
had softened Orson’s resistance to Hollywood. But he also had been gravitating toward a cinematic style for some time. He had been using blackouts and onstage curtains to minimize the time between scene shifts. The revolving platform of
Five Kings
, as critic Nelson B. Bell wrote in the
Washington Post
, was a type of “motion picture technique,” bringing mobility to the settings and characters “in such a way that the effect is one of continuous action and dialogue with a revolutionary blending of scenes.” The revolving stage also reminded the
Philadelphia News
critic J. H. Keen of “an old-time motion picture.” The actors in
Five Kings
noticed the same cinematic quality: “The battle of Agincourt was staged like a long dolly shot, the set turning full circle and thirty or forty extras running in full heat, cannons booming, smoke billowing, trumpets blaring,” Burgess Meredith wrote in his memoir
So Far, So Good.

In April 1938, however,
Five Kings
was still Orson’s top priority, and after the screen test he rushed to the First National Bank in Chicago, where he made an impassioned pitch for a loan against the inheritance he stood to receive at age twenty-five. The money would go to alleviate the crippling debt the Mercury owed to its cast, crew, and suppliers, which Andrea Janet Nouryeh estimated at $36,000 in outstanding bills for
Danton’s Death
and
Five Kings,
plus $2,000 still outstanding from the Mercury’s first season. Dr. Bernstein was also in the room, having agreed in advance not to oppose Orson. The bankers listened politely.

During the meeting, the telephone rang: Hollywood calling. (The call was relayed from Dr. Bernstein’s office, according to Bernstein, who later reported the incident to the
Chicago Tribune.
) An RKO representative was on the line with another offer, raising the ante. “Well, $250,000 is a lot of money, but I can’t consider it,” Welles said as the bankers listened, “No there’s no use your flying here. I’m definitely not interested in the movies.” Not yet.

The bank would consent to a loan, but only $10,000. Orson grabbed at it, though he knew it wouldn’t be enough to save
Five Kings.
He quietly passed the word to people in New York, and soon his cast moved on. John Emery stepped into the role of Heathcliff in the new Broadway production of
Wuthering Heights.
Burgess Meredith accepted a screen offer that would take him to Hollywood throughout the fall. It was hard to imagine
Five Kings
without him.

Orson blamed everyone for the demise of
Five Kings
, especially himself, but he took Meredith’s abandonment personally. Years later, running into him after a long silence between them, Orson wheeled on him accusingly. “Do you know why we closed that show? The only reason?” Meredith said, “No. Why?” Welles told him, “Because you quit, you ran out.”

“I felt physically and mentally unable to go on,” Meredith wrote in his memoir. “Very little went right in that production. For years I relived it in my nightmares. Orson had too many responsibilities. . . . You can blame Orson only in the sense that he should have demanded the kind of help he needed. The confusion threw us all—befogged everyone who was in it. We will always remember it as a towering drama that almost came to pass, but that finally turned into a nightmare. It was a brilliant concept of a great man, but the mechanical problems were never solved. None of us came up to the vision.”