Orson Welles: Hello Americans (56 page)

Meanwhile, there was the show
to do. Arthur ‘Shirley’ Margetson shared a dressing room with Welles and his valet Shorty Chirello, who functioned as his dresser. The Japanese acrobats, Barbette and the other principals had been relegated to their own quarters at the Adelphi. The life of the dressing room was obviously very congenial to Welles. He had had a primitive show-relay system – unknown in Broadway theatres for at least
another decade – rigged up so that he could listen to the parts of the show that he wasn’t in and make notes on them. He was inundated with letters from the public and liked to read them out to Margetson. (‘My husband has been anti-Christ all his life until he heard you read from the Bible on air the other Sunday,’ said one of the more memorable ones. ‘He has been going to church with me every Sunday
since; but it isn’t doing him any good. Dear Mr Welles what shall I do about it?’) Margetson reports the nightly charade whereby the house manager Hugo Schaaf would slip $20 to Shorty, who would then slip it to Welles. One night Dick Wilson caught them at it; all denied it. Welles was thrilled with the deception. ‘He’d gotten away with something! Twenty dollars.’ Welles was in fact on the Equity
minimum of $50.50 throughout the run.

Margetson reports Welles’s little naughtinesses: his delight in trying to make Mary Healy or Margetson dry up on stage; his
late
arrival at the theatre (he was seldom there before 8.45, with a first entrance at 8.50). Three minutes before going on as Fu San, he would call Shorty over to give him a shave. ‘You might think this was a pose of his – and who am
I to say it wasn’t?’ Welles was clearly very fond of the old fusspot he called Shirley. Margetson reports some of his kindnesses: out of the blue one day, for example, he said, ‘Watch the papers next week.’ Margetson found that Welles had given him prominent billing: now the posters and the papers said: ‘Orson Welles and Arthur Margetson in
Around the World
’. He never failed to mention the older
man in his nightly curtain speech. ‘Now that an air-conditioning machine has been installed via the Shuberts at great expense,’ he would say, ‘the very latest thing, mind you, not just. Mr Lee Shubert blowing through a block of ice – I do so hope, if you liked our
little
show, you’ll tell your friends – don’t wait until you bump into them, telegraph them. After all, it’s only the presence of an
audience that distinguishes a theatre from an icebox – although you may find a ham in both.’ ‘Whereupon,’ Margetson writes, ‘he would look at me and say, “I am referring, of course, to Broadway’s newest star.”’ And of course Margetson was hopelessly in love with him for ever after.

Despite the steadily declining attendance figures – not helped by a particularly hot summer – Welles was clearly
enjoying himself, and, using his dressing room as a base, he spread himself in ever more directions. Under the headline
YOU COULDN’T KILL HIM WITH A CLUB,
²⁸
Daily News
reporter Robert Sylvester described the movement order of a typical professional week. After detailing Operations A–E, he continues:

F: preparations for his September night-club debut at the Copacabana for which he’ll have to write
himself out of the early scenes of
Around the World
, run to the. Adelphi then hustle back to the Copa for his two late shows; G: plan to do
King Lear
matinées when
Around the World
isn’t playing; H: plan to revive
Five Kings
. His week actually starts Friday night after the half-hour broadcast. As soon as this is over, he chooses the script for the next week, begins trimming it in time and casting
for the finished script. He works on things through Saturday morning. His dressing room off-time is spent Saturday afternoon and evenings dictating the script for his Sunday radio lecture.

The previous week he had recorded Oscar Wilde’s
The Happy Prince
with Bing Crosby. But his more visionary activities were not
ignored
, either. ‘The other day he accepted a directorship with a new theatre arts
foundation which is going to do everything from educating actors to getting them jobs. He has no further plans at the moment, he says. “I’m just sort of dawdling.”’ Of course Welles encouraged the image. But it was more than just self-promotion; he hardly felt alive unless he was operating on every imaginable front. At some point during the run his current secretary, Jackson Leighter’s sister Lolita
Herbert (who had taken to distilling his letters into a question requiring a Yes/No choice at the bottom of the page), sent him an itemised memo with running commentary; among the items are:

4): am enclosing a letter from S. Eisenstein of Moscow …
²⁹

6): am enclosing a letter from a typical Welles fan in England to whom I have sent your photograph. You are deeply loved & admired there and I have
yet to find a letter from the British Isles that is filled with anything but the highest praise for you personally & for your varied activities … 11): as a result of the wonderful plug you gave the new matchmaking course at Birmingham Hospital a couple of weeks ago on the Pabst show, I was asked to visit the various depts the other day.

Amidst so much activity, there was one notable absence:
Galileo
. In early May, while he was still on the road with
Around the World
, Welles had had Sunday lunch with Brecht; Ferdinand Reyher, Brecht’s close collaborator, had recorded in his diary: ‘Welles now ready to direct
Galileo
.’ But in the interim, while Welles was wrestling with his behemothian extravaganza, Laughton and Brecht – mere amateurs at theatrical production – had begun to worry about
finance. Eventually they decided to approach Mike Todd (the same Mike Todd with whom Welles had just fallen out to such disastrous effect on his personal finances), and Todd had enthusiastically agreed to produce the show. He was not, after all, averse to a bit of culture, having just successfully revived Major Maurice Evans’s
Hamlet
– the
G.I. Hamlet
(Todd’s title, needless to say) – at the City
Center, to Welles’s great chagrin, the dapper, dry, polished Evans being everything that he loathed in an actor. Todd’s accession to the producing team of
Galileo
was casually announced to Dick Wilson towards the end of June at a meeting with Bert Allenberg, part of Laughton’s agency, Berg-Allenberg; Welles and Wilson immediately withdrew from the project. The timing was
poor:
Around the World
was desperately struggling to cover its costs, precisely because, as Dick Wilson insisted in a letter to Laughton, they had opened it in the spring instead of the autumn, to allow Laughton to fulfil his filming schedule. If they had waited,
Around the World
‘would have been a big and substantial hit’.
³⁰
He continues: ‘We don’t like to put the blame on anyone for what apparently is happening, but
we can’t escape the conclusion that we’ve been treated very badly.’ Brecht, meanwhile, having heard rumours in Los Angeles that Welles was unavailable, had sent Mercury Productions a telegram asking if the
Galileo
team could quote their enthusiastic endorsement of the play to other directors. Smarting from these two slaps in the face, Wilson wrote a somewhat rash letter of reproach to Laughton,
informing him that:

directing
Galileo
is only half of what Orson can do or intended to do with the play.
³¹
The idea of the production, the contribution to the work of scenic and costume designers, the casting values – all these count as fully as the direction. When Orson does a play … he really does it. Not a detail of the production-in-plan escaped him. That’s the only way he can function right.
The productions show it. As a result, he has no equal in the theatre. On a play like
Galileo
, with a great actor like yourself, and with a great author, direction is only a job, and one which might so easily be at odds with the production.

It is quite impossible, he says, for Mercury to work with Todd, whose words and actions since their falling out ‘are certainly not conducive to another affiliation’.
He ends by expressing how disappointed he is ‘to lose the opportunity to do (and be associated with you in) one of the greatest productions of the contemporary theatre’.

One way and another it is a very provocative letter, though it is quite clear that Laughton and Brecht were in the wrong in the matter of Todd. It is also clear that they were worried, not unreasonably, that Mercury would not
be able to hold up financially under the impact of the widely perceived disaster of
Around the World
, and that they could help by securing some sort of underpinning. Wilson’s frustration that ‘the terms offered to Todd were basically ones that were refused to us’ is wholly understandable. It is, however, a little hard to know exactly what he is getting at in his paragraph about Welles the director
– that he’s worth the money and the trouble; that he will do it better than anyone else could;
or
that they should just let him get on with it. Whatever the case, it seems a little bizarre that Wilson should be writing to these two world-class
hommes du théâtre
as if they had never done a show before. Laughton replied not to Wilson, but to Welles himself – ‘I do not appreciate your habit of using
a third party to do the calling’
³²
– in a letter of which the draft is clearly much rewritten in anger, full of false starts and rubbings-out. His rage and frustration are palpable. ‘I will answer two points only. First, my contract with Todd is not at all the same as yours. All the points I protested are eliminated. Second, I might have called you and told you immediately when Brecht and I had
decided on Todd, if we could get him. I just plain was not going to put up with the inevitable procrastination. Either the play was going on the earliest possible day or I had to do some movies. Time at my age is dear.’ (He was forty-seven.) Unsurprisingly, he picks up on Wilson’s odd panegyric on the scope of Welles’s directing activities. ‘The rest of Dick’s letter seems to me to be nonsense,
including a passage which says “When Orson does a play … he really does it.” I was under the impression that we were all three to collaborate on “the idea of the production” and so on (now it would be four of course) for this new and difficult play – otherwise how could I also “function right”. You are an extraordinary man of the theatre and therefore I flatly do not believe that you cannot function
as a member of a team.’

Here Laughton had completely misjudged his man. Welles was not interested in the sort of collaboration that Laughton and Brecht had in mind, a kind of triumvirate – or, horror of horrors, quadrumvirate with Todd. Welles simply did not understand the idea of democracy in the theatre, or this sort of creative pool. Laughton and Brecht had blurred the lines between author
and actor, and now they wanted to blur the lines between director, actor and author. That would not suit Welles. He led; that was it. ‘You are the best man in the world,’ Laughton continued, ‘to put the Church of Rome on the stage, to mention only one aspect of the play. This appears to me to matter. Cannot this unimportant thing between you and Todd be worked out. Todd has never spoken ill of you
to either of us. The strongest word he has used is “afraid”. That also is nonsense when there is this play to be told. Brecht greets you. Charles.’ Laughton puts the whole matter in perspective with his fine phrase ‘there is this play to be told’, a phrase of which Brecht would certainly have approved. The telling of the play was Laughton’s whole ambition, to which everything else was
subservient
. To Welles it may have seemed exciting, fun, a challenge, ‘one of the greatest productions of the contemporary theatre’ – in other words, more glory; but to Laughton it was a way forward for the future – the future of the theatre, but equally, perhaps, the future of mankind. ‘It seems that Brecht is our man and is launching the theatre back to us on the old Elizabethan terms,’
³³
he had written
to Alfred Lunt. ‘This is a new play, and it is of such stature! It is as important as, if not more important than, reviving the classics.’

Welles replied to Laughton’s passionate letter with some dignity, but without making any concessions. He was prepared to let the play go rather than deal with Mike Todd. He reviews the history of the venture, starting with Todd’s withdrawal from
Around the
World
after finding himself to be ‘fresh out of dough’: ‘Believe me, Charlie, we had no desire to produce this dam costly behemoth of a spectacle.’ He describes their negotiations with Brecht and Laughton, holding out for a decent deal, then proposing to forgo any stake in the show. ‘According to our understanding, we were to start rehearsals about a week from now in Los Angeles.
Nothing short
of the news of your deal with Todd would have kept us from fulfilling this commitment
.’ It is hard to accept this argument, since
Around the World
was still running at the Adelphi, and there was no talk of the show closing. Welles challenges Laughton’s claim that he needs to make a movie – he’s had five months since they agreed to do
Galileo
in August. As for Dick Wilson’s phrase about Orson really
doing a play, ‘he was just trying to reassure you that once I start in on the actual job of rehearsal it would be the hard work of dedication, with no other concerns or projects to interfere’. He thanks Laughton for ‘thinking I’m “the best man in the world to put the Church of Rome on the stage”. I think I’m the best man in the world to put
Galileo
on the stage. My love for it as a director, if
not as intimate, is quite as warm as yours: the actor-author’s. This is my particular equipment for the work and I terribly regret that this equipment can’t be put humbly and industriously – as it would have been – to the service of a noble and important theatre work.’ He says that Todd’s abandonment of
Around the World
, plus giving
Galileo
the good autumn slot:

has combined to cost me more money
than I’ll be able to make for quite some time. This is absolutely no concern of yours, but it does have its little place in the crushing weight of my disappointment. You say Todd ‘has never spoken ill’ of me. And I’m thankful to learn that the ‘strongest word he has used is
afraid’
.
Well, it’s sure Todd has nothing to fear from me now. I’ll never cost him a cent. And if he manages to get together
enough money for the play, I fervently hope he’ll never cost you an hour of unhappiness. I don’t honestly think he will. He can be generous, and is utterly incapable of pretentiousness. You don’t, of course expect him to inspire you, but I do believe you’ll find him stimulating. He is touched with that particular grandeur which belongs to all the best circus showmen. You will enjoy this, for he
has plenty of accompanying charm; and you will know how to translate it into terms useful to Broadway success.