Orson Welles, Vol I (27 page)

He was particularly keen to surround himself with actors experienced in Shakespeare. When his friend Alexander Woollcott, that great pundit, on the recommendation of Professor Thornton Wilder, sent him a young man of imposing stature,
startling self-confidence and an impressive knowledge of – not to say easy familiarity with – the Collected Works, McClintic must have jumped. He was not an easy man, and not easily impressed; but this was something he wanted in his company. ‘It was obvious to me that this extraordinary-looking young man with his beautiful voice and speech was a “natural” for a part in
Romeo and Juliet
, and it
seemed at the moment he was the best to play Mercutio.’
²
In addition, he asked him to play Chorus, speaking the first lines in the play. Katharine Cornell was equally impressed: ‘We were all struck by his beautiful voice and speech and always provocative acting methods. It was obvious from the time that he gave his first performance with us that he was a tremendously talented boy.’
³

It remains
remarkable that a key role in a huge new production of a play about which both Cornell and McClintic were anxious should be entrusted to a ‘boy’. It is no less surprising that McClintic should have cast him in the role of the quintessentially romantic young poet Marchbanks in
Candida
, ‘a strange, shy youth of eighteen, slight, effeminate, with a delicate childish voice, and a hunted tormented
and shrinking expression that show the painful sensitiveness of very swift and acute apprehensiveness in youth’, according to Shaw’s stage directions. ‘He is so uncommon as to be almost unearthly.’ No one could accuse McClintic of type-casting. However, both Cornell and he knew the play intimately, and were prepared to take a risk. As for stammering, stuttering Occy in the revived
Barretts of
Wimpole Street
, that again was at the very least
imaginative casting, though not so extreme. It was a part for a young actor simply to be pleasant in. In fact, Welles tried to get out of playing it; he would rather do nothing than play such a minor part, according to the company manager, Gertrude Macy. The contract was conditional on his accepting all three roles, so he gave in. It would have
been a wonderful break for any other young actor to be offered Octavius in such company. But Welles had the smell of glory in his nostrils.

Rehearsals were not without incident. McClintic was a painstaking, demanding director, innovatory in his methods. His staging was tasteful and skilful, essentially conventional; he surrounded himself with the best talents – for
Romeo and Juliet
he engaged
Martha Graham to stage the dances, which she did without a whiff of innovation, simply exercising her considerable taste and skill. His work with the actors, however, was probing, designed to ensure freshness of response and freedom from hackneyed formulas. Using neither the Stanislavsky method nor any other theory, his was a very different approach to that of the block-it-and-run-it Broadway
directors of his day. ‘He began,’ according to Mary Henderson, ‘by having his cast sit around a table and read the play over and over again for a week. He did this to allow the actors to get to know the script and each other, and to convey to them the kind of performance he wanted.’
⁴
‘Talkative, nervous, very witty,’ said Burgess Meredith of him. ‘He’d spend half the time during rehearsals telling
you stories, to get you into the spirit of the theatre, of the play, of your part. Then he would get these flashes for the high points of the play, and act them out for you. He did it in a kind of broad caricature, so that you wouldn’t imitate him.’
⁵
Meredith found McClintic ‘an extraordinarily effective director’. He was also volatile, passionate and intolerant of resistance. Stories of his towering
rages are legendary.

It is evident that he and the seventeen-year-old Welles did not see eye to eye. The sort of elegance and psychological verisimilitude that McClintic was after were elusive to Welles, both by instinct and experience. The poetic theatricality of Mac Liammóir and Edwards – their curious combination of an atavistic acting style with radical staging methods – and his own flamboyantly
rhetorical manner were things that needed, according to McClintic, to be eradicated. ‘Orson at that time always played to the top row of the third balcony, both in make-up and projectivity,’
⁶
according to a fellow actor, John Hoyt. McClintic disapproved of Welles’s ‘hammy ways’. And Welles, buzzing with the avant-garde influences and full-frontal
theatrical assault he had known at the Gate, his
mind still teeming with the ideas about staging he had been evolving in
Everybody’s Shakespeare
, can scarcely have been excited by McClintic’s sedate production, either. Nor were relations with his fellow actors of the best. Basil Rathbone, the English actor who had already played Morell to Cornell’s Candida in an earlier revival and was now her forty-two-year-old Romeo, vividly expresses the
animus he felt against his young co-star in his autobiography
In and Out of Character
: ‘Orson Welles had come to our company via Dublin, Ireland, Thornton Wilder, and Alexander Woollcott and was supposed to be a boy wonder verging on the phenomenon of genius. With this type of advance publicity much should be forgiven him.’ It is understandable, if not altogether attractive, that the highly trained,
brilliantly skilful older man should have resented the prominence accorded to the callow young Welles. Welles had no time at all for Rathbone. But he reined himself in. He knew which side his bread was buttered on. And McClintic and Cornell seemed to have sensed that, whatever the artistic disagreements, the buzz that he brought with him was in itself an asset.

His touch with the press had
not deserted him. Shortly before the launch of the tour, his debut was announced, in some style, to the waiting world.
YOUNG ACTOR TO PLAY MERCUTIO AND MARCHBANKS,
said
The New York Times
. A photograph of Welles, noble and concerned, hand in pocket, dominates the theatre page. This is the sort of publicity coup that a young actor dreams of. The legend, exposed to the national press for the first
time, was already evolving. The copy by Wilella Waldorf claims that Thornton Wilder saw Welles on stage in Dublin and wrote to Woollcott who wired Cornell. ‘She has agreed to the selection and Orson Welles is therefore enrolled as a leading member of her troupe.’
⁷
The now standard story of his arrival at the Gate is duly retold, with an addition: ‘from the Gate he went on to the famous Abbey Theatre,
where he had the distinction of becoming a featured performer – the first foreign player so honored. Ruth Draper was the second.’ This imaginative information can only have come from him; rather risky, one would have thought, since the Abbey were at that time touring America – about, indeed, to arrive in New York at any moment. He was nothing if not bold. Of course, nobody had heard of the
Gate, and everybody had heard of the Abbey. ‘Returning to America about a year ago, young Mr Welles decided to become a writer. His play,
Marching Song
, will be produced in November at the Gate Theatre in Dublin.’ It had, in fact, been flatly turned down
by them. At this early stage, it is evident that Welles had a great gift for providing good copy, a quality always endearing to the press. If
what had actually happened was a little dull, he would obligingly spice it up; at a pinch, he would invent something altogether new. Of course, journalists will always simplify and italicise, but they had a wonderful collaborator in ‘young Mr Welles’.

The Cornell tour was anyway a major event for the press, even without his help. Starting in Buffalo, it was to end in Brooklyn, after covering
16,538 miles, having played 77 cities in 7 months: a total of 225 performances. This represented a tremendous act of faith in the idea of touring; an idea whose time, it was widely believed, had gone. The rise of radio and film had closed many of the regional theatres; the majority of the rest had been converted into movie houses. There were now no more than four or five companies a year on the
road; the country simply didn’t get to see the big shows. ‘In the 1930’s Broadway began to assume its overwhelming importance to American theatre,’
⁸
wrote the great lighting designer Jean Rosenthal. ‘The objective of all productions became the New York run.’ In Ethan Mordden’s striking phrase: ‘all the rest was just dead wire’.
⁹
Cornell and McClintic boldly bucked the trend, and, treading where
only third-rate touring companies like those of Fritz Leiber (a sort of Donald Wolfit
manqué
) and Percy Vivian dared to venture, they offered their highly wrought, richly costumed and strongly cast shows to an America starved of quality theatre.

Buffalo in New York State was where they chose to open the tour, not with
Romeo and Juliet
but with
Candida
. Cornell’s performance (of which John
Mason Brown had earlier written that it ‘glows with the radiance which is so uniquely Miss Cornell’s own. Its pictorial qualities are at once arresting and unforgettable’) was again warmly received; Welles’s performance was the subject of some controversy. Rathbone was very clear about it: ‘[Miss Cornell] was so beautiful and so desirable that had she murdered Morell and married Marchbanks we would
have forgiven her – or almost – because in this production Marchbanks was played by Orson Welles, whose performance was so fatuously unpleasant that Morell became, by contrast, a deeply sympathetic character.’
¹⁰
Welles had his revenge years later when he told Leslie Megahey on BBC television: ‘Basil Rathbone … had to shake me as I said: “You shook me like a rat.” It’s pretty hard to be shaken
by
a rat – you know, Mrs Campbell said he was two profiles in search of a face … a very thin, slight figure and we did it behind a couch and I sort of crouched. And of course, it always came out as a terrible,
terrible campy thing … one of the poorer moments in the American theatre.’

McClintic was terse about Welles’s performance: ‘His March-banks to my way of thinking was never right.’
¹¹
Even
Roger Hill considered him hopelessly unsuitable in the part: ‘He could play
Jew Süss
but not a normal sixteen-year-old boy.’
¹²
Enthusiasm for his performance came from a surprising quarter: Gertrude Macy, the company manager, whose life he made something of a trial: ‘He was flamboyant, exciting, hammy … he gave an excellent performance. He should have been slight & delicate; yet he was enormous
and clumsy.’
¹³
His appearance may have contributed to his strange impact: he had had his hair permed. ‘People gathered six-deep outside the beauty shops to sneer,’ according to Welles. Interestingly, Macy adds that ‘he appealed to the general run of audiences who weren’t tied to a preconceived concept of the role.’
¹⁴
Marchbanks has always been a problem role; few actors since Granville Barker
have been able to render Shaw’s poet convincingly; only Rupert Graves in recent times has succeeded. Despite Macy’s enthusiasm, it may be doubted if Welles’s performance really made sense; nor does it seem that he tried very hard. McClintic’s final verdict contains some of his irritation: ‘That he got by was by no means enough.’
¹⁵

The Barretts of Wimpole Street
was another triumph for Miss
Cornell and another damp squib from Welles. Cornell’s performance was already legendary. ‘By the crescendo of her playing, by the wild sensitivity that lurks behind her ardent gestures and her piercing stares across the footlights she charges the drama with a meaning beyond the facts it records,’
¹⁶
wrote Brooks Atkinson in
The New York Times
. ‘Her acting is quite as remarkable for the carefulness
of its design as for the fire of her presence.’ Behind the evident tastefulness of her performances was both latent temperament and painstaking, sometimes painful, work. Everything was considered and refound night after night. The casualness of Welles’s performance as Octavius must have been deeply offensive to her. ‘He was just adequate, always reading his lines intelligently, but sloppy and
careless as a member of that well-disciplined, strictly ordered family,’
¹⁷
according to his defender, Gertrude Macy. He was unwilling to submit himself to the ensemble feeling that both Katharine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic strove for. Where was the glory in that? ‘I personally believe that his sprained ankle on the day of our Los Angeles opening was contrived so that the audience would not
have to see him in that very subordinate role.’
¹⁸
(Macy again.) He played the part under sufferance, which is the
most destructive possible attitude to bring, undermining the play, the other actors, and, ultimately, oneself. It is also short-sighted; there are, of course, no small parts, only small actors: when Burgess Meredith played the role in a revival of the same production, the
New York
American
said of him ‘his performance begins to confirm the suspicion that he’s just about the most able and versatile of the younger actors’.
¹⁹
By his own lights, however, Welles was right: he wanted to establish himself, immediately, as a leading actor. He was interested neither in developing his craft nor in exploring his range. He was sublimely confident of his right to hold the centre of
the stage, and his readiness for it, and he was impatient to be allowed to get on with it. Not for him the profound need to lose himself in another person, nor the desire to expose himself in public, nor even the compulsion to dazzle and thrill.

It is a curious feature of Welles’s personality, this: it would be wrong to describe him as merely ambitious, or simply arrogant. He simply knew that
he was formed by temperament and physique to be a leading actor, so he would do the job. This strange conviction lies behind the casualness of so much of his work as an actor. Neither in interpretation nor in execution did he push himself very hard; he made a good strong decision about the character, devised the appropriate make-up and performed. That was that. The physical impact was all. Tom
Triffely, seeing
The Barretts
in New Orleans, was overwhelmed: ‘his entrance was so strange, so extraordinary, like a Martian. He towered like a Buddha with a wig on’
²⁰
– an unexpected description of Elizabeth Barrett’s tongue-tied little brother. After his barely adequate showings in the season’s two revivals, it is as well that he found his stride in
Romeo and Juliet
. In the role of Mercutio
his odd charisma and the part he was playing came together.