Orson Welles: Hello Americans (54 page)

Not only reporters were inspired to heights of prose-writing by Welles: the cartoonists
went to town, too. The great Al Hirschfeld produced one of his small masterpieces, which suggested something of the impact of the movie screen in conjunction with the live action, turning the Indian rope trick into an odd, embryo-like profile of Welles. Don Freeman’s view of the backstage area in the
New York Herald Tribune
was even more vivid, with Welles as Dick Fix somewhere in amongst all
the livestock, the elephant, the eagle, the nautch girls, the stagehands, the moon, the boat and the drums, with Margetson and Mary Healy high up on a platform, their backs to us, facing the audience. The cartoon appeared the day of the only two previews, matinée and evening. The press night, the next day, was Friday 31 May, Memorial Day. It was the last show of an exhausting season to open. That
morning, Cole Porter took a plane to California. No such luxury was available to Welles. He had to sweat it out, quite literally: there was no air-conditioning in the Adelphi. ‘In hot weather,’
³⁵
Fanfare
reported, the theatre was ‘an approximation of a Methodist Hell’. Despite the heat, the show
went
as well as it had ever gone, mechanically, musically, dramatically, comically; there were fourteen
curtain calls. Holding his hands up for silence, Welles made a speech: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be
asked
to make a speech. Hitherto I’ve only
had
to make one to apologise for the performance.’

AS SO OFTEN
in the theatre, that first night was the best of it. The following day brought the sort of notices that, while not totally dismissive, nonetheless failed to make the theatre-goer, weary after a long season, reach for the telephone and make a booking. Welles had a following – there was a modest advance – but the huge show required a capacity audience
merely to break even; in these situations, it is the floating voter who needs to be persuaded, and nothing in the notices suggested that you would be unable to face your grandchildren if you missed it. While acknowledging this or that item of merit, an impression of enervating incoherence was conveyed. It was all, of course, very personal: it was Welles (and not his show) that was being judged,
although, oddly enough, he was thought to be the best thing about it.

‘There is hardly a word to fit this musical fare,’
¹
said Vernon Rice of the
Post
. ‘It is mammoth, it is gigantic, it is lavish. It is also dull.’ Irving Cahn found it ‘as amorphous as a splash of mud and as pedestrian as its title … if
Around the World in Eighty Days
lasts that long, I’ll be surprised.’
²
Robert Garland – ‘only
eighty days? you ask yourself. Surely it must be more’
³
– added: ‘Orson, disguised as a magician, makes ducks, geese and chicken disappear. He is good at this disappearing stuff, is Mr Welles. So good is he that, halfway through
Around the World
, he has made the plot disappear as well. No plot, no show!’
Time
, which gave the show its most quotable quote – ‘
Around the World
is Orson Welles with
his foot on the loud pedal which is roughly the equivalent of a lunatic asylum at the height of an electrical storm’
⁴
– brutally observed that ‘there is something pretty empty and amateurish about the show. It falls down as burlesque, displaying far too little wit, far too much Welles.’ The problem,
Time
said, was that ‘unwisely Welles’s extravaganza pauses from time to time for identification
as a musical comedy. But the love interest, the exotic dances and Cole Porter’s tired score merely check the pace without livening the party.’ Welles the leading actor seemed out of step, again, with Welles the director.
The
elements of his multiply-split personality stubbornly resisted integration. The
Times
made the same point: ‘When the guffawing Mr Welles goes off stage, the show goes with
him … the production numbers have an inclination to take themselves seriously … miles removed from Mr Welles’s vast burlesque.’
⁵

If Welles felt he had never had good reviews from the New York press, he could no longer maintain that, though admittedly his performance was praised only in order to denigrate the rest of the show. ‘Orson in casting himself temporarily as Mr Fix has made a grave error.
For when he has to quit to report to Columbia, he is robbing the show of the only personality to support it. It is his tongue-in-cheek playing – his versatility – his vitality that set the pace and dominate the entire company. If once again he wanted to prove himself the Welles of Onlyness, he’s accomplished his purpose. For without him,
Around the World
will be the Welles of Loneliness.’
⁶
It
is probably unnecessary to identify the quote as coming from the trade paper,
Variety
. There were more amiable reviews that relished the quirkiness of the show, notably an appreciation by Wolcott Gibbs in the
New Yorker
, who, describing the show as ‘a fine musical cheese dream conceivably suggested to him by something once written by a man called Jules Verne’,
⁷
hoped that ‘Mr Welles will be able
to keep it open for the entertainment of other happy adolescents at least until another spring’. The childlike quality of the entertainment was identified by a number of reviewers: ‘Out of the same mould as the British pantomimes, traditional Christmas entertainments for children,’
⁸
said William Hawkins of the
World-Telegram
, accurately identifying what was clearly an essential problem of the
show: ‘The material is too often imitative of the period it is depicting … rather than being amusingly satirical.’ Welles was obviously dangerously torn between affection for the genre and the desire to send it up. ‘It’s all done in a let’s-put-on-a-play spirit … children will probably love this show. But the guns in your ears and feathers in your hair are not mature substitutions for a contagious
sense of humour.’ Nichols of the
Times
, half admiring, half critical, wrote: ‘These products of showmanship are put forward with great gestures and an air that is half burlesque, half small boy. Mr Welles and his associates are enjoying themselves and make no secret of that fact …’
⁹

John Chapman came to the rescue in the
Daily News
: ‘I, on the other hand, had a wonderful time. To me
Around the
World
was grand, gorgeous and goofy’
¹⁰
Obviously the evening was bursting with high spirits and goodwill. Equally obviously it was seriously
lacking
in the sort of skill that is not merely the
sine qua non
of vaudeville, but its
raison d’être
. ‘Mr Welles’s own magic act,’ said the sweetly benevolent Gibbs, ‘has an air of being a genial, off-hand parody of all such performances, and it must be
somewhat irritating to professional workers in the field … not even Mr Welles is quite up to two-and-a-half hours of sustained comic improvisation.’ Lewis Nichols, returning to the show, pronounced it ‘the latest example of the good and bad qualities of Orson Welles the showman’. Falling into the tut-tut school of criticism that Welles so readily provoked, he said, like a caring but anxious schoolteacher,
‘[the show] needs discipline. It needs some higher editorial authority to say “no” loudly and frequently. Through carelessness, inertia or just the guardian angel’s being away for the moment, it slows down into failure.’
¹¹
He was not necessarily wrong. The one aspect of the show that was universally praised was the Japanese circus, staged by Barbette with iron discipline, no doubt: circus has
no alternative; in its absence the result is death or disfigurement. ‘This fills the stage,’ said Nichols. ‘This is what the whole should be.’

The physical beauty of the circus scene – all pink and white – is clear from the production photographs, and owed much to Welles’s vivid appreciation of Japanese art. The physical production in general was clearly remarkable. ‘Mr Davison has been prodigal
with his talents.’
¹²
Cole Porter’s wife Linda claimed, no doubt rightly, that the sets were inspired by illustrations for a very rare first edition of the Verne, which she bought her husband when they were embarking on the project. Davison reproduced Victorian theatre techniques with some thoroughness, and the result was impressive in very much the way the eighteen-seventies production must have
been; there can scarcely have been so much painted scenery on the American stage for fifty years. No doubt there was a danger of over-kill in the sheer profligacy of the design, but it was still a remarkable achievement. It was Alvin Colt’s conceit to have the girls wearing exaggerated bustles wherever they were, ‘and as the world tour progresses it is fun to wonder where those Victorian rears
will pop out next’.
¹³
John Chapman was one of the few reviewers to have anything good to say about the score: ‘Cole Porter’s tunes have a way of sneaking up on one … like Begin the Beguine which I and everyone else failed to notice when it first appeared.’
¹⁴
But Wolcott Gibbs remarked, ‘if God will forgive me, Cole Porter’s music and lyrics are hardly memorable at all’.
¹⁵
Chapman tried to suggest
that Welles had created a new genre. ‘It is part musical show … part circus, part vaudeville, part Olsen and Johnson, part movies.’

Nobody thought the show was perfect, not even its greatest partisans; in the end, judgement came down to whether you were in sympathy with Welles’s underlying impulse in staging it. ‘The production at the Adelphi is shot through with the personality, imagination
and drive of Mr Welles,’
¹⁶
said Chapman, ‘and for my money he is … the ablest and most versatile in the American entertainment business.’ There was something, many people felt, that Welles had that no one else in the modern theatre did. Lewis Nichols, observing almost wearily that ‘the recent arrival of
Around the World
brings up the matter of Orson Welles again’,
¹⁷
suggested that ‘the State legislature
should pass a bill prohibiting Mr Welles from leaving the theatre … excitement is needed on Broadway and he is the one that can give it. Even in the case of a show as far removed from the superior as is
Around the World
, there are a good many original qualities. They are qualities only known to a showman and their appearance in the neighbourhood of Times Square is too rare.’

Alas, he did not
also say: go and see the show. It was absolutely imperative and a matter of some urgency that tickets should be sold: the show had cost, according to Suskin in
Show Tunes
, $300,000 at a time when a big musical could be produced for $100,000.
Kiss Me, Kate
, two years later, cost $ 180,000. Even the critics were worried – Wolcott Gibbs said:

There are mischievous rumours that the thirty-four scene
changes (requiring the presence and this time,
¹⁸
it may even be, the actual services of fifty-five stagehands), the incredible profusion of mechanical devices, and the employment of a cast that must include every fascinating character that Mr Welles has ever met make the cost of
Around the World
literally prohibitive – the idea of conducting an enterprise that can’t possibly make money would,
of course, have an almost irresistible charm for that rich, unusual mind.

Broadway was suddenly aware of the dangerously escalating cost of putting on shows; Burns Mantle, writing in that same season of 1946, laid the blame at the door of the unions: ‘Unless some means are found to check the mounting demands, which in the case of the stagehands’
¹⁹
union have gone to the absurd limit of threatening
action on plays with a single set of scenery unless extra hands are employed for a second imaginary set, the future may see an unavoidable, drastic curtailment of production.’ The gargantuan cost of
Around
the World
was as much attributable to reckless planning and lack of forethought as it was to union demands, but simply to keep the show running on Broadway was a vast expense: the show needed
to take a thumping $28,000 a week to break even.

To whip up business, Welles wheeled into action: his first stop was the all-powerful broadcaster and
New York Daily Mirror
columnist Walter Winchell. Welles sent him a telegram telling him that he had made a curtain speech quoting Winchell’s remark that they had everything in their show but the kitchen sink, and saying that they’d fixed that, bringing
out a real kitchen sink for the bow.
HATE TO KEEP HECKLING YOU BUT IT’S LIFE OR DEATH FOR ME.
²⁰
PRAY YOU CAN FIND A WORD ON YOUR AIR SHOW TONIGHT. I KNOW I HAVE NO RIGHT TO ASK YOU THIS, BUT HONESTLY SHOW DOESN’T DESERVE TO CLOSE, AND YOU’RE THE ONLY HOPE
. Then Welles asked the great composer-producer Billy Rose, for whom he had tried and failed to mount the play
Emily Brady
two years earlier,
to put in a word, and Rose duly wrote a column addressed to Welles, to whom he referred as ‘this wild-and-woolly wunderkind’.
²¹
‘Listen, Thunder-In-The-Mountains, isn’t it about time you made up your mind whether you’re Senator Pepper, D. W. Griffith, or Kupperman the quiz kid?’ Rose wants to reclaim Welles for the theatre. ‘I’d like to see you go back to being Just Plain Orson, the toy tornado,
who tore the town apart a few seasons ago. You’ve been away too long, Doubledome. I knew it when I saw your show the other night. To this paying customer
Around the World
is the doodles – a small boy’s dream of show business come true.’ Again and again, the references are to toys and small boys. ‘When it comes to high-jinks – you’re Belasco shooting Roman candles! Anyone who’d like to be in a
toyshop at midnight when the toys come to life will adore your show … this is your town … as far as I’m concerned you’ve got more rabbits in your hat than anybody who has hit the theatre since George M. Cohan.’