Orson Welles, Vol I (26 page)

Clearly he had no ambition to be a bull-fighter. It is interesting that he felt obliged to insist that he had no ambition as an actor, either, when every letter he wrote suggests the exact opposite. It is possible, though, that as long as he wasn’t at home, he could put off the
insistent demands, both his own and those of others, that he get on and do something, be somebody. Every indication that we have suggests a blazing ambition, an enormous compulsion to cut a swathe in the world. It may be that he was trying to escape that nagging, imperious demand by travelling. At least he would be able to say when he returned that he hadn’t wasted his time: he’d proved himself in
the bull-ring.

He returned to Chicago. Once back there, he was unable to deliver very many drawings. ‘All that hot summer of 1933 I had kept Orson slaving in a Chicago Rush Street “studio” just large enough for one small bed and one oversize drawing board,’
²⁷
wrote Roger Hill. ‘There he turned out literally thousands of detailed sketches, most of them crumpled and thrown away in angry frustration
by a self-critical young artist. But I saved over twelve hundred and these went to press.’ And if this were not enough to eat up Welles’s energies, Skipper invited him to direct the Todd Troupers in
Twelfth Night
, in Hill’s own edition, for the Chicago Drama League. He played Malvolio – in a somewhat swashbuckling, Italianate makeup if the photograph is anything to go by – and designed it, too,
after a picture-book design for an earlier production by Kenneth MacGowan, Robert Edmond Jones’s collaborator. It’s unlike Welles simply to copy another man’s work. The suggestion was Skipper’s; if this lack of creative contribution indicates a certain half heartedness on Welles’s part, that would be understandable. From the High Atlas Mountains and the corrida to the Chicago Drama League must have
felt like a retrogressive move.

However, he was fond of the play (he often announced productions of it: as late as 1960 he was laying plans to do it in London) and may have derived some satisfaction from standing in front of an audience again: it had been eighteen months since his final performance in Dublin. The open-book setting, hand-painted by Welles, has some charm: the page turns to
give a new scene, opening with the words
A PLEASANT CONCEITED COMEDIE CALLED TWELFE NIGHT
or
WHAT YOU WILL
, going on to
ORSINO’S CASTLE
(with distant sea),
OLIVIA’S GARDEN
(with cypress grove) and so on, with a pleasant, light use of stylised perspective. In the Toby Belch/Andrew Aguecheek scene, Maria and Malvolio, both in nightshirts, seem suspended in the air at the side of the book-leaves.
The costumes are largely Elizabethan in feel, apart, perhaps, from Maria’s polka-dot nightshirt and semi-mediaeval head-gear. Welles had over half of the high school boys in the cast, typical of Skipper’s policy of pupil participation; Hascy Tarbox, now resident genius, played Aguecheek.

They won first prize – ‘at last’, in Roger Hill’s words. It is always better to win than to lose, but it
can’t have meant very much to Welles, after the sort of dreams he’d been entertaining:
Coriolanus
and
Othello
in Dublin;
King Lear
on Broadway. His trophy may even have seemed to mock his ambitions: a schoolboy prize. Certainly by the time a few weeks later that he was moodily drinking cocktails at a party thrown by the salonnière and musician, Hazel Buchbinder – a Todd parent – he told one of
the other guests that he was ‘a writer’. Perhaps he said that because his interlocutor was a writer himself: Thornton Wilder, Professor of Literature at the University of Chicago, author of a couple of admired novels, and some experimental plays though not as yet the ones by which he would become internationally famous. Welles and he had a rather flirtatious conversation around the piano – Wilder:
‘Do you play?’ Welles: ‘Yes, but not on the piano’ – which may be the basis of Welles’s later report to Barbara Leaming that his first reaction was to think ‘here’s another queen’. Wilder was gay, but scarcely a queen (in later life, Welles seems to have used the term synonymously with
homosexual). ‘A mixture,’ according to Alexander Woollcott, ‘of poet, prophet, hummingbird and gadfly’.
²⁸
Wilder
was that curious phenomenon, a shy party-goer.

‘By some surprising “jump of association” – I really had no idea who he was’
²⁹
he asked Welles ‘Are you the young American actor who made such an extraordinary success in Dublin?’ He had heard about him, not via
The New York Times
, but from his sister whose friend Lady Longford had written about him in a letter from Dublin. Welles admitted to
being the very same young American actor, but poo-poohed his acting. Wilder poo-poohed his poo-poohing and tipped him off that his friend Katharine Cornell, for whom he had translated
Lucrece
, (one of her few flops), was looking for a young actor to play Marchbanks on her forthcoming tour. Wilder would introduce him to Alexander Woollcott, who would introduce him to Miss Cornell and her husband-director,
Guthrie McClintic. ‘Get on a train tomorrow.’ He did; the train’s name was the Broadway Ltd, and on it he sped to his next date with destiny, the eighteen-month hiatus in his career suddenly terminated.

The letter of introduction Wilder wrote to Woollcott gives a new version of Welles’s Irish career: Welles, he reports, had been lending some friends a hand in painting the scenery for
Jew Süss
, heard about the desperate search for a Karl Alexander, presented himself and was cast. ‘The reviews were so astounding that he was kept on to play Othello and Hamlet’
³⁰
– which may have been what Welles said. Wilder describes Welles as round-faced with a lock of hair always falling into his eyes, and prone to affect an abstract pose. He did not affect it for long in Woollcott’s presence. No doubt
he was trying out various personas for size: wisely, since he was about to enter the very big league of personality players. Woollcott, through his journalism, his radio work, but above all through his ceaseless social networking, was one of the key figures of pre-war civilised Manhattan. Fat and fruity, his personal legend reached its apogee in
The Man who Came to Dinner
, in which he was depicted
as the imperious and infantile Sheridan Whiteside. (It had its apotheosis when he himself appeared in the role on stage.) Of indeterminate sexuality, friendship was his delight and his gospel. He took particular pleasure in advancing not only his and his friends’ reputations, but also in creating those of talented newcomers. Almost unheard of now, advancement through personal recommendation was
one of the principal ways in which the theatre functioned: ‘who you knew’ was often the open sesame for young actors. Talent was not the ultimate criterion; a family connection or a chance introduction
at a party would do it. Without influence, simply getting through to one of the big Broadway figures like Guthrie McClintic would be all but impossible; a young unknown from Chicago, Illinois wouldn’t
even begin.

Welles instinctively grasped this. ‘You have given me a whole ring of keys to this city, and I’ve been busy all week excitedly fitting them into their locks and opening important doors,’
³¹
he wrote to Thornton Wilder. ‘If I don’t cover myself with glory now you’ve opened up this New York to me, why then there’s nothing to cover.’ In introducing him to Woollcott, Wilder had put
him in touch with the single most influential man in New York; Welles set about charming him with great dedication. Soon he was ‘my hulking prodigy’. Alexander King gives a glimpse of their relationship at the period: ‘I remember shortly after Orson Welles arrived in New York I was living in Woollcott’s apartment … Welles suddenly showed up looking terrible. Woollcott immediately dressed him from
head to foot; he gave him all the clothes he could spare. Then he took him out and got him shoes, which were hard to find because his feet were so big. Then he introduced him to Katharine Cornell.’
³²
The chronology may be out, but the relationship is clear: Welles had found himself another daddy, as he was to do so often in his young manhood. He needed, and unerringly found, someone to look after
him. If luck is defined as opportunity plus readiness, he was always ready; he knew how to make the most of the gifts destiny so generously threw his way. To put on someone else’s clothes is a very intimate thing to do, suggesting great trust and a certain degree of identification: if I can wear your clothes, I must be awfully like you. There was in him – and this was only intensified by his great
bulk, the copious scale on which he was constructed – an ability to provoke protectiveness in others; Woollcott extended his protection in very practical ways. Things moved fast. Immediately after his first, highly successful, meeting with Welles he secured an interview for him with McClintic; later that night the exhilarated young man wrote to Roger Hill from the Algonquin Hotel:

Just a note
on a night of triumph.
I’ve signed the contract. I am to play Mercutio – Marchbanks and Octavius with Katharine Cornell
.

Mr McClintic hasn’t even asked me to read!
There may be a worry in that but
Mrs Robert Edmond Jones
formerly the great (she’s still great)
Miss Corrington
who
made John Barrymore’s ‘Hamlet’ HAS
heard me. Enthuses pretty much. Will coach me
. – looks pretty much like the saga
has begun. – All my love – Orson.

He was quite right; it had.

D
ADDA BERNSTEIN
had finally been out-manoeuvred. All his efforts to steer Welles away from the theatre had failed. His resistance to Welles’s chosen career was not unreasonable; joining a hard-pressed, overcrowded, underemployed profession during the worst slump in America’s history would not normally be considered a shrewd move. As if
he were writing at the specific behest of Bernstein, the distinguished New York critic Burns Mantle wrote, in the
Chicago Tribune
, that same year of 1933, ‘If I did not know how useless they are, I should start a campaign of discouragement directed at those young people who insist on a stage career. Now that the summer theatres are in full blast and considerable local talent is being employed,
the urge to act is again sweeping the country and the requests for advice are piling in … for every six or eight letters I have from ambitious actors, there are at least two from various actor charities. Listen, for example, to this: “The emergency, to some extent, continues … more than $94,000 has been given out to the needy in all branches of the theatre. More than 6,000 men, women and children
have received help and about $700 a week is being distributed at this time.”’ But Welles was all right; he started, as he so often did, at the top.

His engagement to play Octavius Moulton-Barrett in
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
, and Marchbanks in
Candida
, and, particularly, Mercutio in
Romeo and Juliet
is one of the most extraordinary breakthroughs in theatre history. His exuberant telegram
to Maurice Bernstein (‘just signed contract with mcclintic to do mercutio marchbanks octavius with katharine Cornell stop biggest and best debut in america for me’) was no word of an exaggeration; but the cautionary note then sounded was also wise, in view of the enormity of the gamble: ‘dont rejoice too loudly i can be kicked out during rehearsals’. It is a great indication of Welles’s personal
impact even at the age of seventeen that he got the job. It was
only
his personal impact that had secured it, since they had never seen him act, didn’t ask him to audition nor even to read. It is also an
indication of McClintic’s considerable faith in his own judgement. A great deal was at stake in this season.

The production company that McClintic and his wife ran was Broadway’s flower; Welles
was joining a team which epitomised the refined best of American theatre. Built round its star, this was none the less a company which aspired to an overall excellence at every level. Katharine Cornell was already, at the age of forty, a prime contender for the title of First Lady of the American Stage. There was no First Gentleman: the theatre of the early thirties was, as Brooks Atkinson liked
to say, a matriarchy. Cornell’s fellow actress-managers Helen Hayes and the Australian-born Judith Anderson were her principal rivals, but she, in close partnership with McClintic, was a more adventurous manager than either. Her range as an actress was remarkably wide, encompassing flappers and dutiful daughters, killers and Candida, though not as yet any classical role. Taller than actresses
were then supposed to be (five foot seven inches in her stockinged feet) she had a unique presence, ethereal and passionate, exotic and ordinary. Bernard Shaw had written at the time of her first Candida: ‘fancy my feelings on seeing the photograph of a gorgeous dark lady from the cradle of the human race. If you look like that it doesn’t matter a rap if you can act or not. Can you? – GBS’. She could;
despite feelings of discomfort and sometimes actual physical pain when acting, she was entirely devoted to her craft. She and her husband had met in Jessie Bonstelle’s Detroit stock company; there they had learned excellent habits of work and a sense of responsibility to both the theatre itself and to the audience – especially the less wealthy section of it: ‘it is an old story that the balcony
and the gallery are the true support of the theatre. They have done well by me throughout the years and I in turn feel an obligation to them,’
¹
McClintic wrote. Their partnership, a
mariage blanc
(he was homosexual), was one of fierce commitment in which their mutual and unquestioned support enabled them to challenge each other unceasingly. Their lives were their work; the theatre was their faith.
It was very serious and it was great fun, within formal limits. Even fun had to be disciplined.

From
Candida
to
The Green Hat
, from
The Letter
to
The Age of Innocence
, Cornell’s work for other managers had been consistently striking and varied; when she and McClintic took the plunge into management, they had an enormous success with its first venture,
The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Alien
Corn
which followed had been a comparable triumph. Typically, instead of looking for another vehicle, she was now taking on a challenge she had nervously
avoided: Shakespeare. It was a challenge for McClintic too. He had proved himself a master craftsman in staging the well-made plays (frequently adaptations of novels) in which his wife triumphed.
Candida
was the nearest to a classical play that
he had come; and that is a long way from the conventions and freedoms of Elizabethan theatre. When it came to Shakespeare they were both very unsure of themselves (though not of each other); they prepared very thoroughly, McClintic immersing himself in scholarly editions and critical literature, feeling obscurely inadequate in the face of what he saw as the ultimate challenge. Nervous of presenting
their work to the New York critics, they planned for
Romeo and Juliet
a year-long tour of the United States, to give themselves a chance of getting it right.