Orson Welles: Hello Americans (55 page)

(It’s worth noting, by way of a brief parenthesis, that Billy Rose was responsible for
Jumbo
, his own 1935 musical extravaganza, to which
Around the World
was sometimes compared. It starred
Jimmy Durante, with Paul Whiteman and band, a Rodgers and Hart score, a Hecht and MacArthur book, bareback riders – one of whom was seventy-five years old – a troupe of acrobats all aged sixty-plus (among them Barbette), midgets, clowns, death-defying aerialists, jugglers, fire-eaters, tightrope specialists, lion tamers, and close on 500 live animals, including Big Rosie in the title role. The
clown A. Robins kept pulling everything from chairs to endless bananas
out
of his pockets, while he changed costume with a flick of a handkerchief ‘and never for one moment lost a beat from the rhythm of cacophony he emits’. Beside this,
Around the World
and Orson Welles were rather small beer.
Jumbo
cost $340,000 and lost $160,000, so perhaps an encomium from its producer and creator was not
the ideal endorsement.)

Welles obviously buttonholed John Chapman of the
Daily News
, who wrote in his piece that ‘Orson tells me that if necessary he will act Hamlet and do a roller-skating act if these would seem helpful.’
²²
Elsa Maxwell was wheeled in next: ‘I was thrilled, entranced, goggle-eyed, bewitched and bewildered by my trip
Around the World
,’
²³
she wrote in her influential column in
the
New York Post
. ‘Mr Welles inadvertently dominates every part of the stage, scene and play whenever he appears … his magnetic, amazing, opulent rich personality makes out of a tiny insignificant part something so gigantic as completely to overwhelm and in fact wipe out the rest of the cast.’ She reports that Welles is making a curtain speech in which he reminds critics of the demise of Percy
Hammond after
Macbeth
. ‘He does it in such a funny manner, with a Welles-ian tongue-in-cheek-ism, that is quite delightful and Mr (George Jean) Nathan and Mr Garland need not worry too much about their summer colds.’ None of it made any discernible difference at the box office.

In fact Welles had a splendid platform from which to promote himself and the show. Just before he had started rehearsals
for
Around the World
, he had revived the Mercury Summer Theatre of the Air, which was transmitted on Friday nights (meaning that there could be no Friday performances of the stage show, another blow to the chances of financial recoupment: his suggestion that the show could be broadcast from the theatre during an extended intermission was scorned by the unions). On the first Friday of the run at
the Adelphi,
Around the World
, naturally, was the chosen classic, and the broadcast is a potted version of what was happening on the stage every other night of the week. If the show was chaotic, the radio programme is bedlam. The narrative – a fairly simple one, after all – is virtually incomprehensible. Margetson soldiers valiantly on, giving a reasonably clear account of himself and the role;
Welles roars around, indulging in the radiophonic equivalent of pulling faces (pulling voices, perhaps). ‘I’ll get your man, Inspector, if I ’ave to search the ’ole of London from Tooting Bec to Putney Green,’ he says as Dick Fix. ‘I’ll join you later, Chief. It’s time for me to go to church and write blasphemies all
over
the ’Oly books.’ The pallid songs, including ‘Snagtooth Gurtie’ and ‘Flow,
music, flow’, make little impression, except for Elsa Maxwell’s favourite, which is moderately amusing in a sub-Cowardian manner:

Alas if you’d only been

Born on British land

Ruled by our gracious Queen

The more readily you’d understand

Wherever they fly the flag of old England

Wherever they wear the old school tie

Wherever a fox would never chase a fox-hound

Wherever a steak and kidney
make a pie

Wherever they’re certain that

The Derby’s not a hat

Wherever to ice your drink is still a sin

Wherever the air is full

Of old John Bull

Whatever is not cricket can’t win.

Welles is breathless and charmless as narrator, a role in which he had never before failed. No doubt it was all done in a frantic rush, but it was a sad waste of an opportunity, firstly, to create a record of
the show, and secondly, to sell tickets for it. (The comparison with the first, 1938,
Mercury Theatre of the Air
version is painful: in that Welles had played Fogg simultaneously clipped and suave, rather like his Lamont Cranston (The Shadow’s soigné alter ego), and none the worse for that; while the Mercury stalwarts – Ray Collins, Edgar Barrier and indeed Stefan Schnabel among them – gave masterclasses
in radio acting.)

Continuing to promote the show in a slightly lower key, Welles used his other radio slot – the
Commentary
, still broadcast under the aegis of ABC on sustaining radio, and reaching a relatively small listenership – to muse on the show and its fate:

I think the theatre is suffering from a galloping lack of dignity. The theatre has never been so poor in my lifetime.
²⁴
But this
is always true right after a war. Not that there aren’t many deserved hits on Broadway right now. Nor is
Around the World
the antidote. On the contrary,
Around the World
is made up of very old stuff – things that have enchanted me from the time I saw them under canvas, in a one-ring circus, in the theatre or a
Carnival
. It’s like hanging around the toy displays at a department store around Christmas
time. Or going out and buying a whole store.

It is curious how frequently in moments of great enthusiasm this self-confessed hater of childhood refers to the delights of infancy: directing a film, famously, was ‘the best train set a boy ever had’. He lists the delights on display at the Adelphi: ‘There’s a train wreck, an attack by Indians, old-fashioned movies, low comedy and a score by Cole
Porter. Actually I would go and see the show myself many times,’ he says, ‘perhaps once a week … if somebody else were putting it on.’ He continues in that vein of aggressive nostalgia to which he is prone in moments of depression, with the sense that there are no standards any more. ‘I haven’t liked a musical since the old Ziegfeld days when they had really funny men and lush women. Not that
Around the World
is a musical comedy – it’s an extravaganza. Musicals today are too smart, too chic.’ All alone at the microphone, he becomes unexpectedly emotional and personal. ‘Let me tell you something of what it’s like at a Broadway opening … any Broadway opening has much in common with a bull-fight … it’s a question of life or death. Kill or the bull kills you … and with a show it’s kill
the people – or – or else the audience just walks away and leaves the show to die of loneliness.’ There is, for Welles, an unusually strong unarticulated emotion here; a real feeling of rejection. ‘Our show is getting ovations from its audiences. So,’ he claims, not entirely accurately, ‘we have been successful in building it into an authentic hit … in spite of the real killers of the theatre … the
dramatic critics who deliver the swift justice of an oriental court. Because of the power they wield, the critics have retarded the theatre these past years.’ He rehearses complaints familiar to actors, directors and writers from time immemorial: ‘because they must see each new play that is presented they are too easily bored and too readily lose sight of the fact that the theatre is primarily intended
to entertain’. This is scarcely the position Welles had occupied in his assaults on Hollywood, which he had ruthlessly attacked for its vacuousness, so at this point, perhaps wisely, he moves on to another topic. In any case, the argument with critics can never be won: a critic criticised suddenly becomes the champion of free speech, the aggrieved artist someone who ‘cannot take criticism’.

In the case of
Around the World
, it is clear that critics were, on the whole, broadly unsympathetic to what Welles was attempting,
and
that they felt, moreover, that he had failed in what he set out to do. To that there is no answer. A quick look at what was going on in the theatre that season suggests that Welles’s taste for extravaganza was not in tune with the times; nor was his acting likely
to win the palm: Broadway had taken to its bosom Laurence Olivier (at his classical zenith) and the very young Marlon Brando, two actors of exceptional individuality, in their different ways both single-minded artists, next to whom Welles was bound to seem generalised and outmoded. In that year’s
Variety
poll, Olivier was elected Best Actor, Brando Best Supporting Actor and Most Promising Young
Actor. As for the shows, the musicals were all book musicals with immensely strong scores:
Call Me Mister, Three to Make Ready
and
Annie Get Your Gun
, with
Oklahoma!, Show Boat, Song of Norway
and
Carousel
from the previous season still playing. There was a strong dramatic showing, apart from the Old Vic’s contribution: new plays included the Lunts in
O Mistress Mine
and Judy Holliday in
Born
Yesterday
, and from the year before Laurette Taylor in
The Glass Menagerie
and
State of the Union
(the Lindsay and Crouse play about the search for a Republican candidate for President, the sort of thing Welles might profitably have turned his hand to); there was in addition a slew of ‘Negro problem’ plays.
Nellie Bly
– another tale about a trans-global traveller who sets out, in fact, to beat
Fogg’s record – had opened and closed ignominiously in January at the Adelphi; not, perhaps, a great omen for
Around the World
.

In this context, from the perspective of ‘profile’, Welles’s show could only seem a bizarre anachronism. To be sure, there were those who loved it: Joshua Logan, director of that season’s hit,
Annie Get Your Gun
, wrote to Welles: ‘your production is fresh, witty, magical,
exciting and all the other words I can’t think of now. I was thrilled to hear the audience response at the end and I’m sure you were.’
²⁵
He added some generous and practical observations about the excessive speed of the first scene and attendant narrative unclarity, ending: ‘at any rate your work is like oxygen to the theatre and I hope you keep at it forever’. There was in many quarters a nagging
feeling expressed by a few sympathetic critics that Welles brought to the theatre something unique, rare and in danger of disappearance. ‘I have been to see the show three times and I might say I am enchanted with it,’
²⁶
wrote Oliver Smith. ‘I really felt it was the most exciting show of the year for me, and all I can say is – I love it. It really gives me a certain excitement about working in
the theatre.’

And yet, against these expressions of admiration, it is worth remembering that a mere ten years earlier Welles had been not merely the object of a few connoisseurs’ enthusiasm, but the white hope of the theatre, and the Mercury – now a mere commercial producer – had seemed to contain the seeds of the longed-for National Theatre. The visit of the Old Vic, and the sense of continuity
that it represented, had stirred up the slumbering idealism of the American profession. The visit had been sponsored by what Burns Mantle called ‘that … altruistically minded non-profit organisation, Theatre Incorporated’,
²⁷
which had also just presented
Pygmalion
with Gertrude Lawrence. Theatre Incorporated was a non-profit, tax-exempt corporation committed to ‘a sustained programme of great
plays of the past and outstanding plays of the present’. Its income was devoted to ‘the continuation of such a programme on a permanent basis; to the encouragement of young playwrights, directors and actors through a subsidiary experimental theatre; to the utilisation of the stage as an educational force, to the ultimate development of a true people’s theatre’. Welles and
Around the World
must
have seemed quite irrelevant to such a serious-minded policy, though it was almost exactly the Mercury’s programme and closely describes Welles’s declared aims. It appears to have been some kind of collective with no designated leader or artistic director; Welles, of course, could only have functioned at the head, and as the mascot, of any such organisation, but he had long ago abdicated that possibility.

In fact,
Around the World
is an extraordinary episode in Welles’s career, though not without precedent. There is a clear line in Welles’s work from
The Drunkard
, his first semi-professional production when he was a teenager, at Woodstock, Illinois, to
Horse Eats Hat
at Project 891, through
Too Much Johnson
and on to his variety circuit tour of
The Green Goddess, hommages
all to the broad and flamboyant
popular theatre of the mythical theatrical past, a passion that amounts almost to an obsession. None of it, though, had been remotely on the scale of
Around the World
, which is best understood as a last heroic attempt to re-create the theatre of his childhood, in order, perhaps, to do something for the father who introduced him to it, who believed that life should above all be
fun
, and towards
whom he carried a heavy burden of guilt throughout his life, feeling that he had abandoned him to a lonely, squalid death. Welles had so often honoured the memory of his socially conscious mother in all the improving, avant-garde, politically progressive projects he had undertaken;
Around the World
was
a counterbalance to all that worthiness. It is perhaps worth observing that someone innocent
of Welles’s work outside his filmography would find it almost impossible to believe that
Around the World
was the work of the same man who created
Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons
or even
The Stranger
. It seems somehow so utterly devoid of the shadows that are so intrinsic to those films. The films all have clear, strong themes, even a pot-boiler like
Journey into Fear
, and common preoccupations.
Around the World
has no connection, however tenuous, with any of them. It is a
jeu d’esprit
, pure carnival, Welles’s subconscious on holiday, the bridge between his forays into radio comedy and the films. One is inevitably also struck by the extraordinary discrepancy between the expenditure of time, effort, ingenuity and money on the show and the amount of pleasure it engendered – modest, even
in the eyes of its fans. Welles’s films (contrary to what was generally believed) went relatively little over budget. With
Around the World
he seemed to have no sense of budget whatsoever: he spent money on the show the way he spent his own money in real life. There is something fundamentally disproportionate about the whole venture that is utterly characteristic.