Orson Welles: Hello Americans (53 page)

Despite all these high-jink enjoyments, he was constantly working on the show, and beginning to get somewhere, he felt. The Boston press monitored his progress. According to Eliot Norton, Welles
tried
to negotiate an extension with the management of the theatre, offering the incoming company, the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo (‘a miniature extravaganza,
²⁷
which requires for transportation a mere half dozen cars’), a large financial inducement to find another venue;
Around the World
was intricate scenically, so cumbersome and involved to operate that it would not work at all ‘until the
stagehands have had a course of training equivalent to that which the army gives to P-38 pilots,’ wrote Norton. ‘He might well have taken over the ballet intact and made it part of his own show. A ballet of a hundred or so would have been easy to absorb. Where there’s a Welles there’s a way.’ Welles, he claims, was on the verge of hysteria at least once on the first night. (‘A less cautious observer
went so far as to say he went off the deep end and over the verge, backstage.’) Noting Welles’s propensity for stepping into the roles of missing actors, Norton observes that ‘he did not take part in the nautch dancing nor did he conduct the orchestra, perhaps through an oversight’. Suddenly, the gentle mockery over, the schoolmaster’s hand is revealed. ‘If he wants to rescue the show in time for
the New York opening, I suggest that he give up, for three or four weeks, the role of director. Bring in George Abbott, George S. Kaufman, or possibly Rouben Mamoulian to integrate, coordinate and speed up the show.
Around the World
needs the sure hand of such an expert and the fresh, objective point of view which such a one will bring to it.’ Of course Norton’s prescription would have been anathema
to Welles: it may be a terrible show, he might have countered, but at least it’s mine. Equally, Norton is absolutely right, and
Around the World
would no doubt have been a triumph of a particularly delightful kind had his advice been followed. Interestingly, one member of the audience in Boston had no criticism of the show at all. ‘This is the greatest thing I have seen in American theatre,’
²⁸
he said when he went backstage. ‘This is wonderful. This is what theatre should be.’ It was Bertolt Brecht, and he was now more than ever delighted that Welles would be directing
Galileo
.

New Haven was the next stop. Here the dress rehearsal was over in its entirety by 1 a.m. It was Welles’s thirty-first birthday, and he was persuaded to get off the wagon and have a drink or two with the actors,
doing conjuring tricks for them till 3 a.m. Later that same day, the show opened at the Shubert Theatre. At the first performance the movie projector broke down almost immediately. Welles walked on stage to say, ‘With your kind indulgence,
²⁹
we will now begin the show again,’ which they did. The projector broke
down
again. Welles returned: ‘Cut the movies! – Ladies and gentlemen, I shall try to
explain how this play – or whatever you want to call it – begins.’ The movies suddenly started up again. Welles left the stage. The movies broke down again. ‘It is obvious,’ Welles, returning, told the audience, ‘as most of us stage actors have always believed for some time now, that the movies are not here to stay.’ As if mechanical problems with the physical production were not enough, one of
the actors began to be troublesome. Alan Reed, playing Detective Inspector Fix, complained that his role had been transformed into that of a villain; he wanted to be funny. Margetson reports Welles muttering at one show as he stood in the wings, gloomily watching Reed, ‘I’ve written the part wrongly – this is not a comedian’s role – it should be a heavy – he or the part or both must be changed.’ ‘You
mean you’re thinking of replacing him in New York?’ ‘In New York? – nothing. He must be replaced tomorrow at the matinée … by me, until I can find someone else, and I hope that will be damned soon.’ Welles the serial pinch-hitter duly took over and was very funny, and hardly villainous at all. As Dynamite Gus, one of Fix’s aliases, he walked into a bar and demanded a drink of ‘straight formaldehyde
with a black widow spider riding the olive’. He knocked it back, at which point his moustache fell off: ‘Mighty powerful stuff, that liquor.’ ‘Since he had just written the part for himself, it was rather difficult to know whether he was improvising or not,’ said Margetson. ‘But I assure you, it gave us a tremendous up-lift and drew much laughter from both sides of the footlights.’ This was
the antic spirit that Welles so prized – though it is worth pointing out that the people he admired so much, the real vaudevillians, would never have indulged in it. Every giggle would have been carefully rehearsed. But nothing could show more clearly quite how much he longed to get up there on stage. How good, one wonders, was Alan Reed? Was it his carping that Welles took against? Or was Welles’s
need to perform simply overwhelming? It is all a little murky and not entirely creditable.

Meanwhile, the bandwagon rolled on. The Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia was the next and last stop, a place that held no very happy memories for Welles: here, eight years earlier,
Five Kings
had foundered, victim of the erratic electrical supply, which caused the turntable alternately to whizz and
to crawl. Welles, expecting the worst, appeared before the curtain on the first night of
Around the World
to apologise in advance. Everything went perfectly, causing him to apologise retrospectively at the curtain call
for
the slur on Philadelphia. Despite this graciousness, the indulgent Boston and New Haven press was not duplicated in Pennsylvania. ‘
Around the World
bears the eccentric hallmark
of its producer,’
³⁰
said the
Daily News
. ‘It is an off-the-beaten-path musical as musicals go. Our guess,’ the paper added, helpfully, ‘is that most playgoers will balk at what it has to offer. Personally we found much that was rewarding, plenty that was funny and even more that was downright stupefying.’ There was mystification that Welles – ‘“Orson the Amazing … one of the biggest masters of
self-exploitation of our times’” – was not staying in the show. ‘Welles is one of the prime reasons for most of the customers flocking into the Shubert … they want to see him
IN PERSON.
Welles is very funny, whether he is making a curtain speech apologising for the lights and the defective sound system, playing the part of a comedy detective, or just doing a magician act and pulling ducks out
of conductor Harry Levant’s dress shirt … whatever he does has his personal ingeniousness stamped on it, and is certainly in character.’ Cole Porter, well past the initial euphoria of his first encounter with Welles, was darkly suspicious that the more he worked on his new role, the more Welles cut the musical score. He had changed the character from Verne’s Detective Inspector Fix to Dick Fix, the
detective’s nark, and this seems to have given him unlimited freedom to do pretty well whatever he wanted. The
Record
made an observation that would become the running gag of all subsequent reviews: ‘The show has about everything in it – except the proverbial kitchen sink.
³¹
But when that is brought to Mr Welles’s attention, he will probably order one installed. And when he does it will be a large
and handsome one with hot and cold running surprises.’

No sooner had these reviews been printed than there was a newspaper strike, which meant that the Mercury’s marketing campaign went for nothing; and then, immediately after that, there was a train strike. They struggled on for the two weeks of the run to exiguous audiences, with tensions rising in the number-one dressing room, which Welles
shared with Margetson, five other principals, three chorus boys, two circus clowns, three Japanese actresses and Barbette. Margetson describes the atmosphere in the dressing room, with Barbette ironing the white streamers used by the girls in the circus, while the rest of the company rushes in and out, screaming and demanding things. Barbette announces petulantly, expertly plying his iron:

‘Hardly
my job, but if I don’t do it who in the hell will, I’d like to know … some of these little bitches have the audacity to cut the ends off because they find them too unwieldy, I suppose – how do they know which streamer they’ll get back tomorrow night? There won’t be anything left of them at this rate … and furthermore that property man positively hates me and the whole circus. He ruined the girls’
trapeze act by using one of
my
ropes for Orson Welles’s bloody magic act. Mon Dieu! In Paris I was respected.’

‘Oh shut up!’

‘Taisez-vous yourself. Le style c’est l’homme même.’

‘Where were you born, Barbette?’

‘Texas, why?’

Finally the behemoth rumbled into New York. The financial situation was worse than ever, and again Welles went begging to Korda, who formalised the relationship by offering
him another $30,000 for
Around the World
, effectively an inducement for the film deal that followed three months later, by the terms of which Welles was to get $75,000 per picture for a three-picture deal in which he would appear as ‘artist and/or director and/or producer’. It is possible to imagine worse penalties. Welles never seemed to take Korda’s proposals entirely seriously; not that he
was focusing on anything much beyond the immediate all-consuming needs of the theatrical monster he had bred. The sympathetic left-wing magazine
PM
sent its reporter along to talk to him; Welles was uncommonly candid about its misfortunes, but mindful as ever of the particular audience he was addressing. ‘I never heard of a show which had so much bad luck.
³²
If all the money, time, effort and
heartbreak we’ve put into it could be spent changing Truman’s anti-strike bill it might be worthwhile. The cast has gone through real misery. I’m mortgaged and bleeding. If the show does well, it will deserve it on its pain alone.’ He insists that he’s trying to get someone to replace him in the show, since he’s due in Hollywood on 7 June for what he calls a ‘film chore’ (an as-yet-unannounced film
for Harry Cohn). His expectations of personal success are low: he’s never had a good notice in the New York theatre as an actor, he says (which was not entirely untrue). ‘The average newspaper writer always seems to think it’s time to take me down a peg. Why, I could show you eight floors with clippings that are nothing but wild roasts.’ He allows himself to show a little vulnerability. ‘I wouldn’t
mind being taken down if they’d let me climb up once
in
a while. Actually I don’t like publicity. I don’t like to be interviewed or photographed. I’m afraid of being misquoted. I’m just a tired sort of male Katharine Hepburn,’ he added, coquettishly. In 1937, he says, wistfully,
Time
thought he was great. ‘I was the Laurence Olivier of that year.’

Olivier was much on Welles’s mind at that moment.
The Old Vic Company, under the aegis of the Theatre Guild, was playing in New York and had just taken the town (or most of it) by storm, presenting the cream of their repertory from the legendary season that included
Henry IV
Parts One and Two, the audacious double bill of
The Critic
and
Oedipus
, and finally
Richard III
, in the title role of which Olivier had repeated and magnified the ecstatic
response he had received in London. Olivier (and to a lesser extent the rest of the company, Ralph Richardson, Joyce Redman, George Relph among them) was used by the American critics as a stick with which to beat American classical acting, generally held to be far inferior to its British equivalent. Nothing could have been better calculated to upset Welles, who had very little enthusiasm for the
sort of solid, somewhat fustian acting that, leading actors aside, the majority of the Old Vic Company of the time represented (‘anything but a noteworthy group’, opined George Jean Nathan). Moreover, and even more threateningly, Olivier’s film of
Henry V
had been attracting ecstatic encomia: another actor-director-producer – and in Shakespeare, too. Welles bit his lip on this occasion, but after
describing the circumstances of Alan Reed’s dismissal in a nice fresh version specially minted for the interview – Welles played the part one night to show him how it should be done, and Reed replied, ‘You’re absolutely right, that’s the way it should be played. But I can’t do it that way’ – he adds, ‘maybe we can get Olivier to play it. He’ll be out of work in two weeks.’

The New York press
was agog at the sheer scale of the promised entertainment about to open at the Adelphi Theatre. The venue, on 54th Street, was something of a
théâtre maudit
– or, to put it a little differently, ‘the dump of all dumps’,
³³
in William Craxton’s eloquent phrase – with its unprepossessing brownstone exterior, behind which the auditorium and stage-house were located in a large warehouse-like structure.
‘Finished in rough stucco and Tudor-inspired panelling around the proscenium, the auditorium might easily have been mistaken for a high-school assembly hall,’ according to
Lost Theatres of Broadway
; evidently the theatre was lost long before it stopped putting on plays. After opening its doors – as the Craig Theatre – flop had followed flop until the WPA took
it
over in the nineteen-thirties for
the Federal Theatre Project; it was then occupied by an esoteric religious group until the Shuberts bought it. The first show under their ownership was
On the Town
, a triumph that almost immediately moved to a better theatre. The Adelphi was finally demolished in 1970 and is now the site of the New York Hilton. Dick Wilson had obviously secured a good cheap deal from the Shuberts, but being at
the Adelphi was not something to crow about. It was a lively enough scene backstage, however, when the
New York Times
visited the technical rehearsals:
HOW WELLES’S ‘
WORLD
’
³⁴
GOES ROUND
, the piece was headed, and it was clearly a bit of a mystery that it went round at all. ‘Backstage at the Adelphi looks like Cain’s warehouse brought to life by a madman who added a circus and a barnyard … out
front this is a musical extravaganza, backstage it is raucous bedlam in chiaroscuro, born of a Salvador Dali-Mack Sennett merger.’ (Favourable or unfavourable, Welles and his work always inspired –
demanded
– that journalists strut their stuff; it was almost a point of honour.) The reporter boggled over the forty-five tons of sets, the 1,600-pound mechanised elephant and the fifty-four stage hands
(they obviously hadn’t managed to cut back on any). ‘Sets are dropped six deep; the stage director sets up his script and cue sheet – which look more imposing that the score for the Verdi Requiem. The lighting operator scrutinises six portable boards – twice the number for most musicals – which pull 2,300 amperes.’