Me and Orson Welles (22 page)

And from out of that dark, silent audience I distinctly heard two voices loudly cough out, “Black Crow!”

Oh, Christ.
I bit my lip. I instantly lost my concentration. Welles was staring at me, waiting for my line. He gave me an almost imperceptible nod.

“Here,”
I said and pointed, “is a sick man that would speak with you.” I exited downstage in a haze. My feet tingling, chest hammering; I was sweating.

The play went raging on.

I sat down behind the thunderdrum.
Focus! Focus! Calm down, you idiot!

So Stefan and Skelly had shown up—the crazy sons-of-bitches!

I laughed.
You're not going to mess up, Richard. I look in your eyes, and you know what I see? Images of magnificence!
And if I was going to throw up with nervousness, then nervousness was part of the great chain of being!
There is nothing lifeless in the universe, no chaos, no disorder, though this may not be immediately clear to us.
Yeah!

You actually heard a member of the audience cry out when the first knife came out of Sherman's pocket.

Then one by one they stabbed Caesar—all the music ended, the thunder ceased—just those banks of hard-white lights burning into the audience's eyes, and Joe Holland tumbling down the line of assassins 'til at last he faced Welles. Half-dead, he gripped Welles's coat. Welles met his eyes with a look of compassion—and you wondered for a second if he was actually going to stab him.

“ ‘
Et tu, Brute?
Then fall Caesar,' ” gasped Holland, and he fell against Welles's knife in a dying embrace, the bladder bag of red dye staining his uniform.

From that point the narrative drive of the play was unstoppable. The air was charged, racing along like some crazy Warner Brothers thriller.

Welles did “Romans, countrymen, and lovers” at the foot of the downstage platform. I smelled hot oil, and I turned to see Ash pumping an atomizer on a smoke machine. As the smoke drifted out to the stage it caught the beams of light in stark, angular planes of shadow.

“Swell effect!” I whispered to Ash. He was dressed in a black overcoat because he was also an extra in the Cinna scene.

“Orson thought of it a half hour ago,” he whispered, shaking his head. “Did you ever try to find a smoke machine in half an hour?”

A
chung
from the dimmer board and the lamps hidden under the stage shot their beams straight up into the smoke.

The audience gasped. Some people in the balcony applauded. Then Coulouris was up on the velvet-covered pulpit, and around him rose the columns of light.

Now the crowd of extras (including Ash) had rushed out and were jostling, shouting below him to hear Caesar's will.

Welles told me to continue pumping the atomizer to maintain the smoke effect.

Coulouris was playing the crowd with everything he had. “ ‘Have patience, gentle friends, I must not read it . . . . It will inflame you. It will make you mad!' ”

Still they chanted and stomped:
The will! Read us the will!

Coulouris raised his gloved hand into the smoke-filled light. “ ‘You will
compel
me then to read the will?' ”

They pulled away as he descended from the pulpit, and then they joined him around the blanket-covered coffin of Caesar.

Coulouris's voice became tender and nostalgic. “ ‘You all do know this mantle . . . . I remember the first time ever Caesar put it on . . . .' ”

Then he yanked the blanket away, and they were screaming at the sight of his blood-smeared corpse.

Lights poured sideways from the wings, and the figures in black ran among the beams shouting:
Revenge! Revenge!

Then, in one second, like a cut in a film, the stage turned cold and empty. The smoke dissipated, and just that solitary bulb burned at the top of the back wall.

Welles had been right about that, too. The effect was the perfect evocation of a deserted alley.

I wondered how somebody twenty-two years old could be so unerringly right. Maybe he
was
some kind of genius.

And just when the audience thought all the tension and terror they could bear had been wrung out of them, Lloyd walked out alone into that deserted alley with a sheaf of poems in his hand.

Then from out of the street shadows came the men in the slouch hats—hands in their pockets, cruelty in their voices:

“ ‘What is your name?' ”

“ ‘Whither are you going?' ”

“ ‘Where do you dwell?' ”

And Lloyd had his hands raised above his head, tripping over his legs, backing up to the brick wall, dropping his poems—shouting now:
“ ‘I'm Cinna—Cinna the poet!' ”

Epstein hit the horror chord, and he opened the pedal as loud as it could go.

Blackness and military drums—and the audience got a chance to breathe just a little during the quiet tent scene between Welles and Gabel.

I stood in the wings and checked the tuning of the uke. The trumpet player watched me. “Nervous?” he asked.

“Only if people ask me if I'm nervous.”

“Nervous?”

Brutus and Cassius were apologizing to each other before the battle that would kill them both.

They shook hands. “ ‘O my dear brother,' ” said Gabel. “ ‘This was an ill beginning of the night. Never come such division 'tween our souls. Let it not, Brutus.' ”

“ ‘Lucius!' ” Welles called.

“ ‘Here, my good Lord.' ”

“ ‘What, thou speak'st drowsily? Poor knave, I blame thee not, thou art o'erwatched.' ”

Then came a cannon-blast coughing from the audience, and barely hidden in the hacking phlegm was a voice nearly shouting out: “Black Crow!”

Oh, shut up,
I prayed.
Please, God, shut up!

“ ‘Lucius,' ” said Welles. “ ‘Here's the book I sought for so.' ”

“ ‘I was sure your lordship did not give it me.' ”

Now a wild, cartoon-like sneeze from the audience, and somewhere in that sneeze I heard: “Black Crow!”

At this point I didn't even know what I was speaking. I was just pronouncing syllables.

“ ‘I should not urge thy duty past thy might,' ” said Welles. Then his voice softened. “ ‘I know young bloods look for a time of rest.' ”

I looked into Welles's brown eyes, and I was really
listening
to him.

And my voice grew more tender. “ ‘I have slept, my lord, already,' ” I said, and I smiled at Welles as one might smile at his father.

Welles looked at me for a second, then tousled my hair affectionately. It was a complete surprise—a gesture he had never done before. “ ‘It was well done,' ” he smiled, “ ‘and thou shalt sleep again. I will not hold thee long. If I do live, I will be good to thee . . . .' ” His voice broke in sadness.

I sat on the stage and sang my song. I fixed my eyes on a lamp attached to the first balcony, and I emptied my head of everything else.

 

 

Then the lights faded to absolute blackness, and my part in Julius Caesar was over.

T
he lights streamed upward from the floor; it was the last line of the play. Coulouris stood over the body of Welles. “ ‘His life was gentle,' ” Coulouris said, “ ‘and the elements so mixed in him that Nature might stand up and say to all the world,
This was a man!' ”

The military music rose as the soldiers stood there without moving.

Then total blackness.

Silence.

Then they didn't applaud; they
roared.

The noise broke over every side; it rolled to the stage from the first balcony, from the second balcony, and it didn't stop.

The place was thundering. It was a hurricane of sound.

“My God,” said Epstein.

Jeannie Rosenthal stood by the lightboard, arms folded, face flushed with pleasure.

You could feel it in the floorboards. The torrent of noise rising until your eyes watered in gratitude. And, even at that moment, I knew it was the tidal wave of approval that you heard just once in your life.

Welles, breathless, soaked, took a gulp of pineapple juice. He wiped his forehead. “Start the curtain-call music,” he ordered. He looked around at Coulouris, then at me. He hugged me. “We did it!” Across the stage I could see Gabel embracing Joe Holland; Lloyd was punching Cotten, grinning. Welles gulped another mouthful of pineapple juice, then began laughing, almost spitting it out. “How the hell do I top this!”

 

The applause didn't stop for three curtain calls. Finally Welles came on alone, and the entire audience stood up. Even the cast members and the technicians came out and applauded him. He bowed five times—each time more deeply and more slowly. “He's worse than Jack Barrymore,” Coulouris said.

Flowers arrived, and Houseman was beaming, face rose-colored, shaking hands, and the audience wasn't
leaving.
There were telegrams, and more flowers, and there was Sonja suddenly in a green velvet strapless evening gown, an orchid in her hair. She stood in the wings laughing and hugging everybody. When I hugged her she said, “You were brilliant, Richard.”

There were flashbulbs, and the stage streamed with people. Abdul, in his African headdress, strode up the aisle. “Beeg heet!” he cried out to Houseman.

Two of Orson's old theatre buddies from Ireland introduced themselves to me. They were
extravagantly
effeminate, and had their hands all over me as they talked. “I think this boy would make a
priceless
Hamlet, don't you, Hill?”

“With us behind him . . . .”

Then somebody was shouting: “Black Crow! Black Crow!” and those two drunken lunatics Skelly and Stefan, in their jackets and ties, were pumping my hand. “You stunk,” said Stefan, “but that girl in the tight dress? You could see her nipples.”

“Thanks for coming, you crazy assholes.”

“Is she not wearing a bra or something?”

Skelly said, “Wait 'til the broads at school find out you're in a Broadway show. You'll be slamming before Saturday!”

“You need a ride home? We got Drift's old man's Chevy.”

“I'm going to the cast party.”

“Can we come? Is that girl going to be there?”

Lloyd was walking around shaking hands. “I was magnificent, wasn't I?” he kept repeating. “Wasn't I something else? Did you ever see an audience react like that?”

Cotten had about ten girls around him, giggling, flirting.

Coulouris was leaning against the brick wall holding forth to a group of friends. He sipped from a glass of champagne. “I knew the show was destined for greatness from the first rehearsal,” he recalled. “I remember seeing with a startling clarity that the role of Marc Antony was the psychological
centerpiece
of the play. And that's when it all came together.”

“I've never heard the funeral oration performed like that,” said one of his friends.

Coulouris nodded. “My staging as well.”

“Brilliant.”

Epstein was playing “Lullaby of Broadway” on the organ. The horn player was trying to improvise around him.

Evelyn Allen, in her purple gown, stood talking to some guy with a big gut and black mustache. She held a bouquet of roses. She saw me approaching and her voice got soft.

“Evelyn,” I said. “You were wonderful.”

“Thank you.”

“Lovely, sensitive—”

“Oh, don't embarrass me,” she said.

The guy with the gut was watching me suspiciously now. “You will excuse me,” he said. He had a fairly thick German accent. “But do I know you?”

“He's in the play, Christoph.”

“Oh, yes. I'm so sorry. So pleased to meet you,” he said. He extended his hand.

Evelyn lowered her voice. “Richard, this is my husband.”

He shook my hand as if his entire manhood depended upon it.

“Swell to meet you,” I said. “Evelyn, I'll talk to you later, O.K.?”

I practically ran right into Muriel, who had changed into a scarlet gown with a matching hat. She was wearing fresh lipstick, and she was flirting with some roly-poly guy who looked about sixty. “Orson and I are so
simpatico,
I guess,” she explained. “I suppose I just like working with
men,
you know? I could never do a play like
The Women—
forty characters, all women. My God, I'd go out of my mind. No, I need to be around men.”

The little guy nodded appreciatively.

The band was playing, and some people were trying to dance, but there wasn't any room. Most people were heading out for the party.

Sam Leve came up to me with the
Playbill
and shook his head. “Tomorrow I get my credit,” he said. “But tomorrow the critics don't come.”

“Everybody here knows all the work you did,” I said.