Me and Orson Welles (5 page)

She shrugged. “Some kid. He had a personality problem with Orson.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning he had a personality.” She met my eyes. “Look, Orson's very competitive, very self-centered, very brilliant. He's read everything. Knows everything. And the rule with Orson is you don't criticize him. Ever. So in the name of his talent, and in the hopes of working with him again, you forgive a lot of behavior that would be unforgivable among civilized people.”

“And are you civilized people?”

“Are
you?”
she asked.

We were walking down 42nd Street toward Fifth. I was carrying the two heavy boxes of fliers.

“And you're doing all this for no money?” I said.

“For very little.” She smiled. “I don't think you understand the power of celebrity, do you, Richard? Look, let's take two songwriters, all right?” She pointed to two men across the street. “They're both equally talented, they both write decent songs. But the first guy gets his song on the Hit Parade. And you see, he's suddenly
worth listening to.
The other guy may have exactly the same talent—maybe
more
talent—but for some completely ludicrous reason—bad timing, whatever—he doesn't get his song played. What I'm telling you is that the second guy is suddenly irrelevant. Doesn't count. You pass him on the street.
He makes no difference.
So why the hell am I working for nothing at the Mercury Theatre? Because I want something bigger than Vassar. I don't care if some teacher tells me I'm wonderful—some teacher who's never going to be anything more than a teacher. I'm looking for something so far beyond that. You know, I've got this girlfriend who works for Ross at the
New Yorker
, the high-and-mighty
New Yorker
—she tells me even there it's all running for coffee and kissing his ass and laughing at his stupid, vulgar jokes. I want something so much
bigger
than that. And if the Mercury Theatre closes on Thursday night, and it very well might, I know
twenty
people who would fight to get me a job. Do you know who John promised to introduce me to this week? David O. Selznick! This is not bunk.” Her voice was getting louder, and her eyes were glowing. “David O. Selznick. The man who is preparing to film
Gone with the Wind.
Do you have any concept of the power of celebrity when you're dealing with somebody on Selznick's level?”

“Does this mean you
won't
marry me?”

I
sat in a phone booth across from the New York Public Library, and I pulled the door closed. The seat was cold. There was a RE-ELECT LAGUARDIA sticker on the glass.
This is going to be hard.
I watched a few pigeons scatter along the curb, then I put the call through to my house.

“I have supper waiting,” announced my mother.

“Mom, I'm in New York.”

“Everybody's sitting down to eat. I made spaghetti with pot-cheese and cinnamon. Your favorite.”

“Ma, I'm going to be stuck late in the city. There's an important research project I'm working on for school. I have to spend
hours
at the library; my whole grade depends on this.”

Pause.

“And when are you coming home?”

“I don't know. Late. Late. So late I couldn't even—oh, Ma, here comes the librarian; save some spaghetti for me, all right? Gotta go. Love you!”

 

 

 

Sonja and I walked toward Times Square distributing the fliers where we could: a shoe repair store, a newspaper kiosk. I felt exhilarated and slightly out of control—a good combination. I couldn't quite believe I was walking next to this beautiful twenty-year-old girl with her seamed stockings, her chestnut hair, and her gently mocking eyes. Even strangers stared at her; guys hurrying home from work slowed down—pushed their hats back and looked over their shoulders to steal one extra second's glimpse of her. I saw two guys shining shoes; one of them eyed Sonja, tapped his friend on the shoulder—
get a load of this.

And I kept saying to myself:
why not?
I mean, sometimes, Richard, you get lucky in this world, don't you? Sometimes the wheel just lands on your number, doesn't it? Who the hell was Orson Welles five years ago? He was a seventeen-year-old kid.
(Every day, in every way, my ego is getting bigger and bigger.)
Maybe if you just wanted and believed something deeply enough, the forces of the universe somehow conspired to make it happen.

Yeah, and maybe they didn't.

What a night! What a girl! It was chop suey joints and Arrow-collar guys and the smell of the subway steaming up through the grates. It was the speakers in the music stores playing “I'll String Along with You.” It was the illuminated letters of the
Times
news zipper rolling out the headlines: CZECHS CONFIDENT OF WITHSTANDING GERMAN AGGRESSION. EXPECT NO ARMED INVASION. It was the Astor Hotel and The Pause That Refreshes and Gillette blades in blazing blue neon and the huge illuminated bottle of Wilson's liquor (“That's All”) and Bond's clothing and Sunkist California Oranges—Richer Juice, Finer Flavor—buzzing, blazing scarlet, yellow, and white over every inch of Broadway.

It was one hundred voices at every streetcorner:

“That don't cut no ice with me, buster.”

“Shuddup, ya lousy tart.”

“What's the diff?”

It was kids on the corners hawking the
Herald Tribune, Times, Daily News, Daily Mirror, Daily News, Sun, Post, Journal American, World Telegram . . . .

Sonja and I stood in Nedick's eating hot dogs, the wet rolls drenched in steaming sauerkraut. Between us was the script for
Caesar.

“You've got two real scenes,” she said. “Both short.” She was flipping through the script. “Brutus—Orson—is talking with Portia—Muriel Brassler—a bitch of the first water, but nobody can say anything because Orson is having an affair with her, right? Orson is married, you know.”

“Ah.”

“Absolutely ah. Little Virginia. Very dark, very pretty, very pregnant. They've got this tiny basement apartment over on 14th, but he keeps her pretty much locked away across the river at Sneden's. And if you ever hear somebody yell ‘Anna Stafford!' that's code for Virginia; it means she's shown up unexpectedly and Orson better hide the ballerina he's trying to seduce.”

“The Mercury is sounding more interesting all the time.”

“And the
least
interesting part is
Caesar.
By the way, if anybody asks, you're an Equity Junior Member. And you're getting twenty-five dollars a week.”

“Swell!”

“No, you're not
getting
twenty-five dollars a week. You're not getting anything, except the opportunity to get sprayed on by Orson's spit, but we've got enough Leftos in the company to start a demonstration if they find out you're not being paid. So first there's a knocking sound offstage. Portia exits. You enter.” She pointed to my line in the script, and swallowed the last bit of hotdog. “You've studied acting?”

“You've heard of Eva Le Gallienne?” I said.

She nodded.

“You've heard of the Group Theatre?”

She nodded.

“Well, I never worked for either of them.”

H
alf an hour later I was sitting in an empty seat in the Mercury Theatre, and Norman Lloyd, who played the small role of Cinna the poet, was teaching me the chords to “Orpheus with His Lute,” the song I was supposed to sing. I was trying to banter my way through the fact that I had no idea how to play the ukulele. Lloyd looked barely older than I was; he was the curly-haired guy I'd last seen trying to play the drums outside the theatre, and for some reason he seemed to get a kick out of me. He was sitting now on a theatre seat, his long legs bent painfully in front of him. Other actors milled around the stage—waiting. According to Lloyd, waiting for Orson was the principal occupation of the Mercury Theatre company. Lloyd was filled with an almost uncontrollable nervous energy; one of his legs bobbed continuously.

He strummed a terrible-sounding chord and sang:

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I think you better hope Orpheus is deaf.”

I turned around to see Sonja walking down the aisle balancing a coffee cup on a book.

Lloyd did an exaggerated double-take, and then played a stripper's bump-and-grind drumbeat on the back of the chair. He imitated a burlesque emcee: “I say, there goes another
big
one!”

“She and I had dinner tonight,” I said.

“Yeah, right.”

“I'm serious.”

“You had dinner with the Ice Queen? Kid, every guy in this show's trying to get into her pants. Even Joe Cotten hasn't nailed her, and there's not a broad in the Manhattan phone book he hasn't—”

“Shhhh—”

She said, “Norman, could you verify that your bio is correct for the program? And initial it if it's O.K.?” Up close I could see she was reading
Gone with the Wind.
“Richard, I'll need your telephone number, too, if we need to reach you.”

“She never asked for
my
telephone number,” said Lloyd, not taking his eyes from the page proof. “How does this sound?” He read:
“Norman Lloyd started acting in vaudeville at the tender age of six and remained there for six years.
Does that sound like I remained at the age of six for six years?”

“If the shoe fits,” said Sonja, and she got up to talk to some other cast members.

Lloyd watched her. “Oh, sweet Jasper, I want to stick my head under her sweater! I swear to you, I dream about that sweater at night. I'd give ten bucks for just one good photograph of her. I tell you, one good picture with a few well-placed shadows would do wonders to ease my nocturnal burden. Sonja!
Slake my urge!”
He hobbled about between the seats, pretending to be bent double in sexual frustration.

“She's your kind of girl?” I asked.

“If she said to me: ‘Norman, I'll let you make love to me, and I'll completely open myself up to you, and then when we're done I'm going to shoot you in the head with a pistol,' I'd say: ‘Here's the pistol, baby—now let's get started 'cause my hearse is double-parked. ' ”

The doors at the back of the theatre slammed open, and Orson Welles entered carrying what appeared to be two enormous phonograph records. There was a dark, athletic-looking girl behind him. Then came some technicians, followed by Houseman, whose English accent was now sharpened with anger.
“How dare you, Orson!
We had discussed this.”

“The Mercury Theatre will open when I say it's ready to open,” announced Welles.

“It's not as simple as that anymore, Orson. This isn't the Federal. There
isn't
any front office.
We're
the front office.”

A few feet from the stage, Welles turned on him icily.
“You're
the front office, Jacko. And you're starting to talk like a real bureaucrat, you know that? A small-minded, little copies-in-triplicate-and-please-God-don't-disturb-my-lunch-hour bureaucrat. I left the Federal to escape people like you.”

“We left the Federal because they
fired
us, Orson. This is
our
show now. You can't go around forever playing Peck's Bad Boy and expect people will find it endearing. It isn't endearing, it's simply irresponsible.”

“You started out as grain merchant; you'll always be a grain merchant.”

“And your telling John Mason Brown that the opening date is still tentative is irresponsible, childish—”

“And accurate.” Welles turned to two technicians who were carrying a large phonograph. “Set that up on stage.”

“Orson,” said Houseman, changing his tone. “I'm
pleading
with you. We have
subscribers.
We are trying to sell a season's worth of tickets to a repertory company, and you can't say to people who have made plans and arrangements, ‘The play opens whenever I feel it does.' ”

“The play opens when I'm convinced it's ready.”

“Orson, the play opens Thursday. We cannot delay it again.”

“This discussion is over.”

“It isn't over. I don't care if you have to rehearse for five days straight, we're previewing Wednesday, and we're opening
Thursday.
If we delay this opening one more time, we're dead as a theatrical company.”

“I cannot rehearse with this man in the theatre,” announced Welles, clamping his hands over his ears. “Will someone tell me when he's left the building?”

Houseman headed halfway up the aisle, then turned. “This is an infinitely rewarding partnership, Orson. You go around
smashing
everything, disenfranchising every friend, every supporter we have. And then I'm left desperately trying to clean up your mess. I'm the one who ends up making the apologies, making the corrections—making the ten thousand phone calls I don't even
tell
you about.”

“And I'm out acting in
The Shadow
and
The March of Time
and every other goddamn-son-of-a-bitch piece-of-shit radio show in this city, just to pour
my
money—my
personal
money, a
thousand
dollars a week, into this goddamn-son-of-a-bitch theatre that
you're
supposed to be running.”

“That
I'm
supposed to be running!” said Houseman, the veins in his neck and forehead protruding. “Single-handedly,
I'm
supposed to be running the Mercury Theatre! I'm
killing
myself trying to run it! What in the hell are
you
doing for the Mercury Theatre?”