Orson Welles: Hello Americans (52 page)

For a brief moment, to judge from a press release early in March, Welles’s
friends Paul Feigay and Oliver Smith stepped into the breach, but Dick Wilson seems to have persuaded Welles to go it alone as ‘a Mercury offering’,
²⁰
in Dick’s words. But where would the money come from? Needless to say, neither Mercury nor Dick himself had any money themselves. Welles was heavily in debt to the woman who was about to be his ex-wife, and Lear Radios had just withdrawn their sponsorship
of
Orson Welles’s Commentary
. ABC, the radio network, agreed to keep the show on the air, but Welles’s salary was reduced from $1,700 a week to $50. He had only one thing to sell: his soul. So he swiftly put in a few calls, the first of them to Alexander Korda, who gallantly bought the movie rights to
Around the World
for $100,000, which would tide them over for a little while. The asking price
was a gentlemen’s agreement for Welles to direct four films for him. It still wasn’t enough; the costume houses were demanding advance payment for fabrics to the tune of $25,000, so Welles made a second and infinitely less agreeable call, this time to the man whom he had only recently referred to as the Savage of Gower Gulch, the man who prevented Rita Hayworth from appearing in
The Mercury Wonder
Show
, the man he said would never employ him: Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. Again, all Welles could offer him was the
promise
of a film – to star, needless to say, Rita Hayworth, who had just come to the end of her exclusive contract with Cohn. Welles offered him his treatment of
Carmen
, which was also one of the movies that he was discussing with Korda, but not quite in the same terms.
‘The theme of this picture is sex in the raw and this is the major opportunity …
²¹
at this point we interpose the sexiest footage of the entire picture …
Flesh and the Devil
, purple passion, every attitude of amorous dalliance, the longest kisses the censors will allow.’ It was not Welles’s accustomed language, and it would not have been Welles’s accustomed film. That was not the point. The point
was to get Cohn to cough up the dough: and he did. The show could go on.

By now, of course, they were in rehearsal for
Around the World
. To Margetson’s surprise, Welles turned out to be highly liberal as a director. On the first day the cast had been called at ten; the whole vast company were there on the dot. ‘Orson made his entrance about ten-twenty,’ Margetson wrote in his unpublished memoir,
Orson and I
. ‘We timidly told him we didn’t care too much about 10 a.m. calls. And to our amazement, the Ogre replied, “Tell me whatever time you would like to be called and providing we get in eight hours a day (which is Equity maximum time of rehearsal) I will endeavour to oblige you.’” Whenever they started, rehearsals were wild, exuberant, laughter-driven affairs; Welles was, in Margetson’s
spinsterish phrase, ‘on the water-wagon’, and full of energy and invention. ‘Orson made the whole thing seem so entertaining and effortless.’ The show contained a little over thirty minutes worth of film (Hyde Park, the Bank, a Hong Kong den, Fogg’s flat, the Whist Club, and on the boat), and Welles shot the footage in the rehearsal room. Just before they were to do the storm scenes aboard ship,
at around eleven o’clock that evening, Margetson reported, a crate of whisky mysteriously entered the studio. Welles urged the three actors to drink heartily. ‘Alcohol!’ he cried, ‘Inside and out! I beseech you to take plenty of alcohol. Arthur, dear boy, please take another shot before your next shot.’ ‘Let’s face it,’ says Margetson, ‘he was being just a trifle Machiavellian as well as kind (he
has
a definite sadistic trait, anyway – though only in mild form).’ One of the actors, Larry Laurence, was, it turned out, unused to liquor; Mary Healy, from New Orleans, wasn’t; and Margetson had been drinking whisky all his life. The liquor was being ladled out in such bulk, however, that before long even he became very unsteady. Suddenly Welles threw a huge hogshead of water in his face. ‘It
is a matter of record I took it all without so much as
dislodging
my monocle. Was it great acting? Or was I simply feeling no pain?’ To Welles all this was wildly entertaining: the fun and togetherness of the theatre; this is where he reclaimed the childhood he never knew.

The final run in the rehearsal room lasted three hours and forty-five minutes, with Welles leaping up to fill in for any
absentees. He was clearly enjoying himself more than he had for some time – certainly more than on any movie set, where such romps can never happen. However, he must have got on the train for Boston with some anxiety: three and three-quarter hours is simply too long for any show, except perhaps
King Lear
or Eugene O’Neill, and even O’Neill is questionable.
Around the World
was, moreover, bound
to get longer. When actors are first exposed to a set, a show invariably puts on time, at any rate until they get used to it and cuts can be instituted. And this set was a completely unknown quantity. The actors were due at the theatre for an 8 p.m. dress rehearsal. There were no costumes; no lights had yet been focused. Livestock ran loose backstage, pieces of set smashed into each other, actors
concussed themselves on swinging bars. ‘We are the prey of drunken stage hands and drunken electricians,’
²²
Cole Porter wrote to a friend. ‘Even when they are sober most of them are ninety years old. They all hate the show because there are so many lights and scene changes. They are used to nice comfortable operas where there are two sets and no lighting changes whatsoever.’

The predictable chaos
ensued: expensive chaos. The run of Act One ended at nine o’clock the following morning; it had taken thirteen hours. The fifty-four stage hands and orchestra of more than thirty players were on double and finally triple pay. Eventually everyone was sent home to sleep. The opening performance, due that night, was cancelled while they attempted the dress rehearsal of Act Two. Again, they started
at 8 p.m., this time finishing at 6 a.m., after which Welles and the circus continued to rehearse. Welles, who had very wisely declared from the beginning that he would not be appearing in the show, had impulsively decided that ‘honouring Boston’, as he put it, he would after all make an appearance, as Fu San, a Japanese conjuror, causing doves to materialise in an empty net, skewering a dancing
girl with his rapier, producing aces of spades from unlikely ears. On those few occasions when he wasn’t needed at the dress rehearsal, he would slope across to Al and Jack’s bar across the street to practise the act, which he had never performed in public before. Perhaps it was a way – a highly unusual, entirely Wellesian way – of calming his nerves. Had he
allowed
himself a moment to contemplate
the mayhem he had unleashed, he might simply have taken the next train back to New York.

The world premiere of
Around the World
took place at the Boston Opera House on 27 April 1946, at 8.45 p.m., precisely twenty-four hours late. No single mechanical element of the show – the scenery, the turntable, the props or the lighting – worked as planned. The stagehands were as audible as they had been
during the dress rehearsal the night before. ‘The prop eagle which was supposed to sweep me off the stage in a flash from its nest, on which I was perilously standing almost as high as the top of the proscenium,’ wrote Margetson, ‘came on late and very slowly; then receded and returned backwards to drag me offstage.’ The scene immediately following was supposed to be a backdrop obviously depicting
London, and as an actress entered saying, ‘Is this London?’ practically all the drops for the entire show were lowered and raised alternately at lightning speed – all, that is, except the London one. The audience was, of course, enchanted. The final backdrop to fall showed a minor train-stop somewhere in the snow-clad Rocky Mountains. At this, an actor sticking doggedly to his script and looking
at the scene, replied, ‘Yes, this is London, all right!’ By now the audience was in seventh heaven. The show ended at 11.45, ‘several scenes having been totally amputated’, according to Margetson, which at least had the advantage of reducing the running time.

The
Boston Daily Globe
, drily observing that ‘the Orson Welles genius – if that is what it is – is expressed in many ways’,
²³
sensibly
refrained from commenting on the ‘grandiose musical extravaganza’ until the stage was working better and at least forty-five minutes of the show had been cut. ‘Nonetheless,’ it continued, ‘it is easy to see that there is more production than show … the actors are pretty well lost in the forest of gadgets.’ Margetson came out of it well enough, as did Alan Reed (‘a marathon of quick changes and dialect
comedy’). The reviewer, though admiring the circus interlude, was anxious about a spectacular slide done over the audience without a net: the performer, Ray Good, walked a tightrope from the stage to a second balcony box, then slid backwards onto the stage. In fact this last proved too much for the censor, who ordered it cut on the grounds that ‘the slider, though imperturbed, might fall and
demolish some of the people in the seats below’. The veteran critic Eliot Norton was very taken by the Japanese circus, and particularly the eagle rescue (the bird was shot at and feathers
fluttered
down into the auditorium). But the general sense was of overkill. Production, the
Globe
acknowledged, is important to a show, but here it was emphasised ‘with a smothering ferocity’. The inevitable
verdict was that
Around the World
needed a lot of work. Norton put it with precision: ‘A good theatrical plot has to be so devised that you are not only curious but also eager to see and hear what happens to the principal characters.
²⁴
In this show it is silly to guess at what is coming next. Mr Welles has crammed in everything which he liked in the theatre as a child.’

In the circumstances,
it seems little short of a miracle that the piece held the stage at all. But this was how Welles preferred to work in the theatre: making the show on the hoof. Even he, however, the veteran of the massive
Five Kings
– where he had tried to put
Henry IV Parts One
and
Two
on stage in one three-hour sweep – had never dealt with anything as vast and diffuse as this. The only strategy for this sort
of epic mayhem is, paradoxically enough, to plan meticulously, down to the last tiny detail, but that was quite alien to Welles’s temperament and his habitual modus operandi. Film-making, particularly with films made by or in a studio, to a large extent provides a built-in planning framework; the work is by its nature tightly structured. Welles found this assumption suffocating and uncreative, and
his whole drive during the rest of his film-making career was to combat it, restoring as much as he could the slap-dash, adrenalin-fuelled improvisatory abandon of earlier film-makers. At the pre-war Mercury Theatre, where he was able to call all the shots within a relatively small organisation, he could make it up as he went along, seeking inspiration in the materials before him. But here, in Boston,
with fifty bewildered people backstage, and another fifty bewildered people on stage, and thirty people on triple time in the orchestra pit, he had no such luxury.

He maintained the highest of spirits in the face of what would have caused a nervous breakdown in virtually anyone else. ‘Orson has been a tower of strength,’
²⁵
wrote Porter. ‘The whole company loves him and rightly so because he never
loses his temper or his power to surmount almost impossible difficulties, so if the show flops, I shall at least have had a great experience with a wonderful guy.’ Porter had been enchanted to hear Welles say to a particularly burly stagehand, ‘please, sweetheart, get that scenery up’. The first chaotic performance had done nothing to dent Welles’s optimism. The following morning, reports Margetson,
‘there was Orson smilingly greeting us with “Rise and Shine – now we’ve opened
and
read the roasts, we can
really
go to work”’ – which they did. By the time of the performance that night, Margetson, who carried the weight of the show, and who had been more than a little shaken by the experience of the last three days, fell ill (and one may be sure that with an actor of Margetson’s generation and
temperament, nothing short of total collapse would have kept him off the stage). There was of course no understudy, so – it goes without saying – Welles went on for him, ‘in a fashion typical of his past feats that won him the title of Boy Wonder of the American theatre’,
²⁶
as the
Globe
reported. ‘Welles not only ran through the long lead of the show letter perfect but also played the part of
the magician which was his original role. And to make his one-man-gang performance complete, he sang two songs that he had hurriedly learned half an hour before curtain time.’ This was bliss for Welles. The tedious struggles of the past few years, wrestling with editors, both in print and in film, studios, sponsors, wives, lawyers, children, were all – however temporarily – dissolved in the sheer
joy of the physical act of theatre, and he was able to rejoice in an image of himself with which he was entirely happy: actor-manager of the old school, a father-figure who is at the same time reckless and untrammelled, the Vincent Crummles of the Mid-West. On
Around the World
, he was both in charge of his company – and quite a fierce disciplinarian when he needed to be – and the chief reprobate,
gloriously indulging himself, breaking up on stage, making his lines up as he went along.

For the most part, the audience adored it. Margetson, seeing Welles’s triumph in his role, made a swift recovery, as may be imagined, but a few days later Larry Laurence, his tenorial tonsils in tatters, retired from the fray, so Welles went on for him. Throughout rehearsals and the opening, and even as
Phileas Fogg, he had still worn his moustache from
The Stranger
, now, playing the juvenile, he shaved it off without a moment’s hesitation, struggled into something more or less appropriate from the wardrobe and positively bounced on stage. Naturally, he improvised the role, as, inevitably, did Margetson. ‘On one occasion I was forced to say, “Passepartout, you don’t know what you’re talking about”,
whereupon Orson replied, “You never said a truer word” … whether he was good or not in either part, matters little. He was exciting and unpredictable at all times, both on the audience and the actors.’