Orson Welles, Vol I (18 page)

Welles, in the mid-sixties, said of Hilton and Micheál: ‘They gave me
an education. Whatever I know about any of the stage arts today is only an extension of what I first knew from them.’
¹⁰
He learned his lessons well, but the substance of his thinking was formed here. The Gate was only three years old when Welles arrived; the ideas that lay behind it were still fresh. They were still fulfilling their manifesto, consciously opposing themselves to the Abbey Theatre,
now no longer the poets’ theatre of Yeats’s dream, though he was still running it. They disdained that theatre’s present policy of ‘peasant and other domestic dramas’ performed in an acting style that according to Micheál was merely ‘behaving – their behaviour was Irish and not English, but neither was it acting’.
¹¹
The Gate believed fundamentally in Coquelin’s dictum that ‘the arts differ according
to the nature of their medium; well, the actor’s medium is – himself.’ Micheál had his own variation: ‘The actor works with himself as surely as a philosopher does with his brain, or a prostitute with her body.’
¹²
The crucial word is work. However exotic a bloom Micheál’s personality may have been, it was the outcome of strenuous and continuing cultivation, pushed so that it was naturally and
fluently able to express more and more interesting states of being; and this it was that they both tried to impress on the sixteen-year-old barbarian who had just joined their company. High spirits and a striking presence were not enough.

Rehearsals with Welles were alternately inspiring and dismaying: ‘There were moments that held one breathless with excitement, and there were sometimes hours
together when we would look dumbly at one another with pursed lips and wagging heads thinking, “This sort of thing will never do.”’
¹³
The role of Karl Alexander is not without its pitfalls, to put it mildly. Welles was right to describe it as the fattest of the two parts in the play – ‘it runs the gauntlet of fine temper scenes, drunks, daring seductions, rapine, murder, heart attacks and death.’
¹⁴
Adapted by Ashley Dukes from Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel, it is the story of how a rich and cultured Jew assists to power the minor nobleman Karl Alexander, distantly related to the incumbent Duke. Enthroned, Karl Alexander depends entirely on the Jew, until he turns against him, tracking him down in his private hide-away. Discovering that Süss has a daughter, he attempts to rape her. She evades
him, but in so doing, she falls from an upper window and dies. The Jew has his revenge which precipitates Karl Alexander’s heart attack. Süss is taken away to his death. – The play (‘a tragic comedy’) is, unlike the novel, melodrama. The whole interest lies in the character of the main antagonists. Had the actor playing the Duke failed, the play would have failed, for all that Süss is the central
character. Süss watches, comments, flicks a scene this way and that. Even in extremity, his passion is controlled, filtered
through thought. Matheson Lang, with his extraordinary presence and other-worldly voice had managed the two sides of Süss – cunning sophisticate and deeply religious father – with notable success in the London première; but it was Frank Harvey as Karl Alexander who had made
it possible. The role, Orson accurately observed in a letter home, is ‘all positives’. Unexpectedly he adds ‘I prefer dealing with negations’ – a reference, I suspect, to his shrewd awareness that in a role like that of the Duke, one can do all the work while allowing the other actor quietly to steal all the glory (particularly since Hilton was playing the Jew).

The directors of the Gate had
taken an enormous gamble in hiring him for such a pivotal role. Welles seems to have had no doubts of his ability to play the part, but then he was being kept very busy in the paint shop and the press department as well as in the rehearsal room, so can barely have had time for doubt – Micheál pictures him at the time: ‘He had indeed that unwavering energy of those that are born for the stage, and
after rehearsing the Duke all day and raging round the town from show to show, from Jimmy O’Dea at the Olympia to some earnest young group of Left players reciting
Roar China
in a gaslit garage, he would gobble supper in Noonan’s or the Kitchen or harangue a group of Trinity students or Gaelic Leaguers or the like until the small hours, when he would return, if we gave him the permission and the
keys, to paint flats for us at the Gate until somebody fished him up from a bucket or down from a ladder or gave him breakfast.’
¹⁵
Whatever misgivings Micheál and Hilton may have had there was no going back: on 10 October 1931, the play was announced, including the following: ‘A newcomer to the large cast will be Orson Wells [sic] who served his apprenticeship to the stage at the Goodman Memorial
Theatre in Chicago under the direction of Whitford Kane, formerly of the Ulster Literary Theatre.’ Perhaps he found he could sustain a story about the Goodman better than one about the Theatre Guild – he had after all acted on its stage, though not as part of its company, and never under Kane’s direction. The mention of an Irish name was a smart move. In his long letter to Roger Hill (with a mock
formal frontispiece saying
A SERIES OF PARAGRAPHS DEALING SOLELY WITH MYSELF
) he writes on the last page: ‘Tonight is the first dress rehearsal and the day after tomorrow night I make my
professional debut
(ahem!) – in a foreign country – and in the most accent-conscious city on the globe!’ At the top of the page is a sketch of his periwigged head; above it, in a bubble, the words
OH! YEAH!

OH! YEAH!
indeed. ‘In all the striving years since my debut,
I have never achieved such an ovation,’
¹⁶
Orson said, and for once, this may be the unvarnished truth. The first night of
Jew Süss
was Orson’s night, one of those occasions – theatrical and operatic history is full of them – when a newcomer creates an excitement verging on hysteria that the greatest artists at their height cannot create,
and that they themselves can never duplicate. The effect is perhaps even more startling in a small city (Dublin’s population was a fraction of London’s, and it had perhaps a tenth the number of theatres) and in a small theatre. The Gate held just over four hundred people. For this occasion, it was packed: the Abbey was away on tour, and, more importantly, the company had, for the first time since
moving to its new premises, established a regular audience that it could rely on. They were rooting for the show, which was anyway quite a hot property, a London hit of only four years before, never seen in Dublin. It was a Big Night and no mistake.

Previews were a thing of the future: in Dublin, in 1931, the First Night was the
first
night. Hilton’s technical rehearsals were legendarily long-winded
affairs, sometimes going over two days. He was something of a pioneer in lighting, an absolute innovator in the Irish theatre, but a restless experimenter by any standards. There is every chance that there had never been a full run-through of the play until that first performance. Adrenalin must have been running at dangerously high levels. Orson often claimed that he had never known stage
fright until that night, but his appetite for the fray surely converted such nerves as he had into raw energy. An audience never fails to respond to that appetite, that need, which has a kind of innocence, naked in its lust to perform. He uttered a prayer to Ming Huang, the Chinese patron saint of actors, and entered the stage, as he later said, ‘in the bliss of ignorance, like a baby on a trapeze’.
¹⁷
His first sight of the audience, he said, confirmed Edwin Booth’s description of it as a ‘crouching and invisible beast’. Then he began, scattering his oafish insults and libidinous glances, ‘a full-blooded soldierly figure in field-marshal’s uniform’,
¹⁸
fully thirty-five years younger than the character he was playing.

MANAGER

I beg you to respect his highness’s privacy.

KARL ALEXANDER

Privacy – trash! We live in a royal window, and the rabble are welcome to rub their greasy nose on the glass … we are used to be stared at, as a soldier is used to fire and a pretty woman to kisses … they have seen me before, for my
picture hangs in all their kitchens to be smoked between a pair of hams.

‘When Orson came padding onto the stage with his lopsided grace, his laughter, his
softly thunderous voice, there was a flutter of astonishment and alarm, a hush, and a volley of applause,’
¹⁹
Mac Liammóir wrote. Hilton, as was still the custom, brought Orson forth at the first short interval, then again at the second. ‘Hilton said some words of praise and introduction. Orson swelled visibly. I have heard of people swelling visibly before, but Orson is one of those who really
do it.’ The play resumed. Orson was by now very high indeed. Betty Chancellor as Naomi had her big scene with him; a love scene. ‘His extraordinarily mature acting fell apart. He was then obviously embarrassed and unsure and he tried to hide this by gripping me with such violence that I nearly lost my life but certainly not my virtue.’
²⁰
During the second act, he murmured the phrase ‘A bride fit
for Solomon. He had a thousand wives, did he not?’ and was so fazed by a cry from the audience of ‘that’s a black Protestant lie!’ that he mangled his next line: ‘Ring the canons and fire the bells!’ Before anyone could interrupt, he hurled himself down the steps, and was greeted by an even greater ovation than he had received before. ‘Dubliners, besides being very keen critics, are also generous
with their praise, and I don’t suppose that anything like that frenzied back-flip had been seen on the shores of the Liffey before.’
²¹

He took his final curtain call to a roar of acclaim. At the back of the theatre, or perhaps lurking in the wings, all unknown to Orson, was Micheál Mac Liammóir (who had designed the play but was not in it), observing and judging.

Orson bows slowly, sedately;
that they should realise him like this merits a bow, so slow and sedate the head goes down and quickly up again, up higher than ever, for maybe this is all a dream, and if the eyes are on the boots, blood rushing to the ears, who knows that sight and sound may not double-cross and vanish like a flame blown out, and Orson be back at school again, hungry, unsatisfied, not ready yet for the world?
No, the people are still there, still applauding, more and more and more, and back goes the big head, and the laugh breaks out like a fire in a jungle, a white lightning slits open across the chubby sweating cheeks, the brows knit in perplexity like a coolie’s, the hands shoot widely out to either side, one to the right at Hilton, the other to the
left at Betty, for you don’t mean to say that
all this racket is for Orson? What about Hilton and Betty? And anyway there’s Ashley Dukes, and there’s a man called Feuchtwanger, isn’t there? But whoever it’s all about it goes on and on, then trickles back a little like a sea slowly receding, receding, curling away like a fire burning out, fading inexorably, emptying itself hollow; and God damn that stage manager anyway. Couldn’t he easily steal
a couple more of them before the thing dies down? Take that curtain up again, you silly son of a bitch; to taste the last, to drain it dry, no meat left clinging to the bone: no, no! listen! three pairs of hands keep on, then two, then six, then sixty, and then – ah! – then the whole house again, and up goes the curtain once more and the light shoots like a rainbow through the eyes and the unappeasable
head rears up round as a cannon ball: no bowing now, no boot-licking booby tricks,
let them have me as I am and so. And so
. And the jaws snap, crunch, and then the foolish curtain closes down. For the last time. The last time.

The violence of this passage leaps off the pages of
All for Hecuba
with disturbing savagery. Clearly Mac Liammóir was angry at the eclipse of Hilton and Betty Chancellor:
‘Hilton’s beautiful performance of Süss with its suffering pallor, its agonised repression, the slow-mounting horror of its martyrdom and pain was approved and taken for granted, and so was Betty’s exquisite Naomi, all amber and carved ivory.’ But there’s more, something darker and deeper than that in this account, written, or at any rate published, some fifteen years after the event. There’s
a real loathing, if not of Orson, then of an aspect of him: his crude lust for applause, ruthlessly vainglorious. It’s not the only time in
All for Hecuba
that Micheál, avowedly a friend, turns a remorselessly harsh light on the boy (still, let us not forget, sixteen years old, and in his first professional job). Was there a sense in which Micheál envied what he saw in Orson – a sort of hugeness
of appetite for public approval, a capacity for fame on a scale that Micheál had explicitly renounced by establishing himself in Dublin, an obscure corner of the English-speaking theatre? Did he (by no means oblivious to acclaim) see himself unattractively mirrored in Orson’s shameless stimulation of the audience? The note that seems to underlie the raillery is one of disappointment; a feeling
that Orson had somehow betrayed himself, and perhaps betrayed Micheál too.

The complexity of the relationship between Micheál, Hilton and Orson needs to be considered for a moment, though nothing
definitive can be said on the subject. Orson in later life – after their deaths – spoke very differently of the two of them, seeking to derogate Micheál, and to endorse Hilton. Micheál was, in this
late view, a shrieking, screaming queen, ridiculous in his make-up, insatiable in his desires and full of malice. Hilton was a terrific chap, trusting, warm, good-natured, who should really have been heterosexual. (‘He just fell under the spell of Micheál, you know, who ruled him like the Queen of the Night,’ he told Leslie Megahey on BBC television.) Preposterously, he told Barbara Leaming that
Micheál felt threatened by Orson’s friendship with Hilton – ‘the friendship of two
men
with no sexual overtones’
²²
– fearing that Hilton might be restored to heterosexuality, a laughable insistence by Welles that his heterosexual orientation was so powerful as actually to be contagious. In fact, Betty Chancellor noted that Orson at that age was abnormally immature in any kind of sexual discussion
‘or even in playing a part that called for a romantic side’;
²³
scarcely a good role model for Hilton’s wavering orientation. What seems more likely is that Orson was drawn to Hilton as a father-figure – not the first time this had happened – and that he had used his uniquely seductive charms to gain Hilton’s affections.