Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (86 page)

Orson’s twenty-fourth birthday was just around the corner in the spring of 1939. Chastened by his setbacks, he had no impulse to celebrate, but neither did he care to leave Chicago, apart from flying back to New York every Friday for
The
Campbell Playhouse.
He had many reasons to linger in Chicago: he had friends there, and favorite bookstores and restaurants and magic shops. He could roam through the Art Institute. Chicago gave him solace.

Welles repaid a favor to Gertrude Lawrence, conspicuously attending her new road production of
Skylark
in the last week of April, and leading the standing ovations that welcomed her to the Harris Theatre downtown.
Skylark
was one of Samson Raphaelson’s hit plays, and the Roger Hills happily accompanied Orson and Virginia to the opening.

The road company of
I Married an Angel
had been playing in Chicago since early March, and Orson also led the applause for Vera Zorina in the last weeks of its acclaimed run. John Houseman interpreted one of Welles’s visits to Chicago as an excuse to spend a night with “the ballerina,” but in fact Zorina was happily ensconced in a suite at the Ambassador East with her new husband, George Balanchine. The couple greeted Orson as a friend: he always sincerely praised Zorina’s performances, and she always listened sympathetically to his heartaches.

Recovered from her operation, Virginia spent most of May and June in Chicago; she and Orson socialized with her parents and made excursions to Woodstock, staying on the Todd School campus. Virginia, like Houseman, was still suspicious of Zorina, but nowadays Orson behaved sweetly and attentively to his wife whenever they were together, and she accepted his reassurance that he and Zorina were merely friends.

Despite his setbacks, Orson did not seem especially downhearted. “Like any genius he must have had his share of demons but he handled them well,” Burgess Meredith mused in his memoir. “I never heard a word of despair from Orson.” Instead, he quietly threw himself into a personal crusade that was as important to him, in its way, as
Five Kings.
He intended to save John Barrymore.

Shuttling to New York for the radio show, Orson heard from a friend, the bedridden dramaturg Edward Sheldon, that Barrymore was behaving erratically in a road show of the comedy
My Dear Children
, in which he parodied himself as a ham actor who is also a great lover. Part of the in-joke was that Barrymore’s fourth wife, Elaine Barrie, was playing one of his three insubordinate daughters. (Indeed, his character literally spanked Barrie at one point in the play.) But after Barrymore consistently disrupted performances with missed lines and antics, his wife withdrew after the Saint Louis engagement, announcing she was going to file for divorce. Otto Preminger, who was directing the Broadway tryout, hastily rehearsed a new actress in her part for the next city on the tour, Chicago, where
My Dear Children
was due to open on May 8.

Barrymore was drinking more heavily than usual, and Sheldon feared that the great actor was at death’s door. Hurrying back to Chicago, Welles rushed to the Ambassador East, where Barrymore’s older siblings, Lionel and Ethel, were waiting for their miscreant brother. They had come to Chicago after hearing the same news. Orson knew all three of the fabled Barrymores, having dined with Ethel at Ravinia, acted with Lionel on the radio, and accompanied his father to meet the legendary John backstage in various Shakespeare productions. With his encyclopedic knowledge of theater, Orson had an almost scholarly knowledge of the Barrymore family tree, and loved talking about the Barrymores as exemplars: their real family name (Blythe); their American father, Maurice Barrymore (“an aristocrat”); and their maternal grandmother, Mrs. Drew (“the greatest actress-manager in America before the days of Fanny Kemble”).

With Orson taking the lead, the three rescuers scoured the South Side in search of the youngest Barrymore, only to find him “pie-eyed in a cathouse,” in Orson’s words, though quite alive. “He wasn’t dying at all—of course he
was
dying, but he wasn’t dying any
more
than he was any other day.” With the siblings reunited, “there followed a great warm weekend,” after which the rescuers entered into a rehabilitation pact, taking turns sitting in the front row at
My Dear Children
for the next few weeks, reminding the black sheep of his obligations.

When Orson spoke of John Barrymore in later years, he grew misty-eyed about their bond. “He was so generous to a young theater man like myself, and so kindly and so gentlemanly and so warm,” he told Barbara Leaming. “He was such a good man!” In terms that echoed the stumbles of his own career, his own mixed legacy as an actor, and the lowbrow turns of his later career—touting California wine, off-brand bourbon, and English peas in TV commercials whose scripts he berated—Orson insisted on Barrymore’s courage and greatness as an actor.

Barrymore’s habitual drunkenness at the end of his life was a masquerade, according to Welles. The celebrated actor feared he was losing his mental faculties, and Orson believed that Barrymore may have suffered from what would later become known as Alzheimer’s disease. Barrymore worried that he was following in the steps of his actor-father, Maurice, also a hell-raiser, whose death was preceded by a mental breakdown when he was onstage with his nineteen-year-old son John. Welles was convinced that Barrymore exaggerated his drunkenness to get through “terrible” plays like
My Dear Children
, in which he was portraying “an over-emoting Shakespearean actor, past his prime and debt-ridden. It was a painful self-parody,” in Welles’s words. But Barrymore worked “as a man of honor because he owed debts,” and always performed as best he could under the circumstances. “He knew he was prostituting himself and that everybody he cared about was ashamed of him, but he managed to play it as though it were a great lark, and to bring the audience into it as though they were at a party. A great performance, really.”

Barrymore repaid Orson’s devotion with mutual admiration. Once, discussing acting with Peter Bogdanovich, Welles described how Barrymore pulled himself together during an otherwise banal B movie to give a wonderful recital of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy. The picture’s director gushed compliments after the take, saluting Barrymore as “the greatest actor in the world.” Barrymore supposedly snorted his reponse: “There are only two great actors—Charles Chaplin and Orson Welles.” Although “I’ve never felt any sort of secure pride in that department,” Welles continued, he prized that compliment above any other he ever received.

Bogdanovich then asked if Welles believed he was “as great an actor” as Chaplin.

“We aren’t in the same league, Peter,” Welles replied. “Or even the same game.”

“Are you a greater actor than Barrymore?” Bogdanovich persisted.

“Of course not. In his time and mine, nobody in our language was ever as good as Barrymore . . . or as bad.”

He then added this intriguing observation about his own acting talent: “What I really have in common with Jack,” Welles went on ruefully, “is a lack of vocation. He himself played the part of an actor because that was the role that he’d been given by life. He didn’t love acting. Neither do I. We both loved the theater, though. I know I hold it, as he did, in awe and respect. A vocation has to do with the simple pleasure that you have in doing your job. Charlie [Chaplin] was a happier actor because he was born for it.”

Orson had turned twenty-four by May 19, the day of the “Bad Man” episode of
The Campbell Playhouse
, costarring Ida Lupino. He stayed in New York into the following week to announce the official world’s fair poem, winner of a nationwide contest, reading the poem to an audience of several hundred at a meeting of the Academy of American Poets in the Federal Building.

Orson had returned to the weekly radio show to find that actor-director Paul Stewart had instituted some modest changes and improvements that helped keep the show running smoothly while the
Five Kings
tryout preoccupied Welles. Welles erupted in anger at Stewart, dismissing him in front of the cast and crew, according to John Houseman, only to appear later outside Stewart’s apartment door at 3
A
.
M
., “prostrate with remorse,” successfully persuading his old friend and vital associate to return to his job on the program. In later interviews, Orson would sometimes grumble that Stewart exaggerated his contributions to the radio show. But for posterity, Welles described Stewart to Peter Bogdanovich as “a lovely man. For years he was one of the main pillars of our Mercury broadcasts; he can’t be given too much credit.”

Houseman, who had marched out of the studio in solidarity with Stewart, also returned for the very next broadcast. “Orson and I saw little of each other that spring except on Fridays,” Houseman remembered. The two men had not discussed the future of their partnership other than to agree to forfeit their long-term lease on the Mercury Theatre building, for which they had no real concrete plans.

Taking Houseman aside now, Orson said he had been fielding offers from various movie studios, but he was not ready to accede to Hollywood. (In mid-May, his agent, Albert Schneider, rebuffed another offer from RKO’s George Schaefer, wiring him that “new developments regarding Welles make it impossible to consider films at this time.”) Orson told Houseman he was still counting on his help in bringing
Five Kings
to Broadway early in the fall. The Mercury Theatre associates at Bass Rocks were moving ahead with plans for summer theater in Cape Cod, but without Orson and Virginia’s participation. The Mercury would lend its brand name to Bass Rocks, while making it clear that neither of the partners was creatively involved.

When Orson announced what he was planning instead for the summer, Houseman could scarcely believe his ears. Welles had decided to strike out on his own—in vaudeville. The year before, according to Barbara Leaming, Orson had sprung onstage at a Forty-Second Street burlesque house, playing the straight man to a baggy-pants comedian friend, and this spontaneous lark convinced him that there was fun and money to be had on the dying revue circuit. For a while, Welles told Houseman, he’d considered whipping together a solo act as a magician, but Virginia had nudged him in a different direction. He was going to star in a stripped-down, tabloid (“tab”) version of William Archer’s
The Green Goddess
, an old-fashioned tingler from 1920 that the Mercury had already adapted for radio.
The Green Goddess
was already booked for a string of midwestern theaters and would open in Chicago.

His earnings would depend on the size of the crowds, he told Houseman, but he planned to recycle the money he made into the Mercury Theatre’s fall season. From the Mercury troupe itself, Orson would borrow only his three “slaves”—William Alland, Richard Baer, and Richard Wilson, the last of whom would help launch the vaudeville tour before joining the Bass Rocks summer theater. Although publicity would link the vaudeville act to the Mercury, nothing really was required of Houseman—which was for the best, as Houseman (who was flabbergasted by Orson’s plans) had been looking forward to a restful summer.

Whenever Welles and Houseman talked about the future, however, their mutual regard and shared aspirations were renewed. Although Houseman was skeptical, he took the surprising news to the New York press. After opening in Chicago on June 9, Welles would play vaudeville theaters in a condensed version of
The Green Goddess.
“The tour will probably continue on into the summer,” reported the
New York Times
, “depending, of course, on the show’s reception and the stamina of Mr. Welles.”

The show business columnists lapped it up: “Orson Welles Goes into Vaudeville!” Was there any better way to thumb his nose at the New York theater establishment, which still doubted his promises about
Five Kings
? Or to prove he was one of a kind, once and for all?

On Friday, June 2, Orson was back in New York for the last
Campbell Playhouse
of the season: “Victoria Regina,” with Helen Hayes reprising her role from the Broadway hit of 1935.

With the
Campbell
series suspended for the summer, Orson was able to appear in other radio programs. Two days after “Victoria Regina,” he stepped in for John Barrymore in the romantic comedy “Business Before Pleasure,” offered by the
Knickerbocker Playhouse
on WABC. Barrymore, still performing in
My Dear Children
, had fallen off the wagon again, though the official word was that he had been “stricken” with illness.

In more ways than one the shadow of Barrymore hung over the
Green Goddess
tour, right down to the young actress, red-haired Susan Fox, whom Orson cast as the damsel in distress: later Fox would marry a Barrymore on the Drew side of the family tree. If the Great Profile could pay his grocery bills with
My Dear Children
, why shouldn’t Orson perform hokum in vaudeville?

Part of the attraction in doing
The Green Goddess
was that, like
Too Much Johnson
, the twenty-minute vaudeville act gave him a chance to employ film footage to supplement the performance. “Using stock footage from a New York film house that had a library of scenes and situations that could easily be spliced into any motion picture, and shooting just a few insert shots himself,” according to Frank Brady, who researched this “lost” footage as diligently as that of
Too Much Johnson
, Welles “created a four-minute introduction” to the plot of the play, opening on a map of India and narrowing in on Mount Everest.

“Next,” wrote Brady, “the film cuts to an airplane, flying at night, lights ablaze in its windows, in the midst of a terrible lightning storm, and being deluged with torrential rains.”

The plane crashes spectacularly. “There was no soundtrack incorporated into the film, but a recording of an airplane motor accompanied by thunder, wind, rain, and then the boom of the airplane crash was to be synchronized with the film and played on the public address system.” Again, as with
Too Much Johnson
, when the film footage ended, the “live” show began.