Me and Orson Welles (6 page)

“I am the Mercury Theatre!”
thundered Welles.

“I resign!” said Houseman. “You're on your own.” He headed up the aisle.

“Just let me rehearse in peace!” said Welles with his arms stretched out to the heavens.

At this slightly conciliatory tone, Houseman stopped to listen.

“No director in the
history
of the theatre would work under conditions like these,” declaimed Welles. “Sabotage. Jealousy. Every single member of this company deliberately attempting to destroy my work. But wait and see!” Welles had assumed a grandiose tone for the benefit of all of us. “I'll mount a
Caesar
that will astound the eye and the ear. It will be Shakespeare as it's not been seen since the time of Elizabeth herself—Shakespeare written in the language of tears and blood and beer—in the language of starlight and fireflies and the sun and moon! The only thing even near to it in the history of American theatre will be my own production of
Macbeth
last year. But this will be greater! Richer! Deeper!” He removed a rolled-up magazine from his jacket pocket. He was playing to the whole theatre now. “Did you see the cover of
Time
? Look at this. The goddamn-son-of-a-bitch
Lunts!
Well, let me tell you something—before this year is over I—
we
—will be on the cover of
Time
.” He gestured to the balconies. “This stage is where theatrical history is being written—with you and me and all of us as its principal players!”

“Orson—” began Houseman.

“Please! Let me rehearse in peace!” He held his ears again to stifle the imaginary clamor. “I will do the best I can for you.
Exhausted
as I am, I will attempt to rise above the arrogance and jealousy around me and get you your opening.” He dramatically climbed the stepladder to the stage. “. . . the
small-mindedness
around here,” he muttered to himself. “I'm
suffocating!”
Then he moved into a pool of light and gestured toward his female protégé. “Let it be said that here was a man who loved the Mercury not wisely but too well.”

“Thursday!” said Houseman.

“Anna Stafford!” somebody yelled from the back of the house.

“Oh, Christ,” said Welles, leaping from the stage.

Virginia Welles came walking down the aisle. She looked to be in her early twenties. She wore an oversized tweed coat, and you could see she was pregnant.

Meantime, Welles was hustling his female protégé into a seat in the fourth row. “You see, Betty, I believe it was Stanislavsky who said to Max Reinhardt—” He looked up, filled with surprise.
“Ginny!
What an unexpected and
delightful
surprise!”

Two steel fire doors opened from the alley onto the stage, and a dozen housepainters were led onstage by Sam Leve, the little man with the crewcut whom I had last seen installing the illuminated Mercury sign. Instantly, there were boxes of paint cans, splattered wooden ladders, rolls of dropcloths.

“Mr. Welles, what I had to do to find seventy gallons of red paint!” said Leve in his heavy Jewish accent. “But the paint is cheap; it's got a binder of fish glue in it, so don't blame me if it smells a little from fish. And I have something else to talk to you about.”

“We also need to paint the platforms gray,” said Welles. He gestured to the stage set, which consisted of three steps leading to a bare platform. From the backstage wall a ramp tilted up toward the main playing area. Four trap doors had been cut through the stage floor—two on each side—and smaller holes had been cut into the central playing area, each one covered with a strong wire grid. Below each grid was mounted a theatre light aiming directly up.

“Mit en drinnen
I need gray paint? Mr. Welles, there's a saying in Jewish:
Mir kennet tanzen ahf svay chassenahs mit ain tuchis.
You can't dance at two weddings with the same rear end!” He removed a folded-up piece of paper from his pocket. “But I want to talk to you about the
Playbill,
the wording, the choice of words, there's a mistake here—”

Welles waved it off without looking at it. “I've corrected it already.”

Leve pointed to a line. “It doesn't represent my contribution.”

“You're looking at the proof; it's all been corrected. See Sonja.”

“Orson, we're ready to test this.” The two technicians had by now installed the phonograph center stage.

“Coulouris!” shouted Welles, and his voice broke. “Vakhtangov, my pineapple juice!”

“Mr. Welles's pineapple juice!” someone shouted.

Vakhtangov ran toward the stage with a bottle of juice. He tripped, the bottle went flying. Lloyd leaped up, caught it—tossed it to Welles.

“Coulouris! Front and center!” Welles gulped down half the contents of the bottle in a single swig. “Where's that gloomy son-of-a-bitch? Vakhtangov! Find Coulouris and tell him to get his no-acting ass down here. Jesus Christ, who's directing this show!”

“That's what I'd like to know,” said Lloyd to me quietly, but Welles had heard him. He pointed a threatening finger out to the audience. “One more comment like that, Mr. Lloyd, and your precious Cinna-the-poet scene hits the cutting-room floor.”

“Are we ever going to actually
rehearse
my precious Cinna-the-poet scene, Orson?”

“Rehearse? I thought you were the great comic improviser, Lloyd. The Chaplin of the Federal! I see Cinna as a lofty, almost-Byronic figure. He's Shakespeare's indictment of the intelligentsia—his indictment of the ivory tower and—”

“I completely disagree,” said Lloyd in a tone that was surprisingly tough. “He's a street poet without a cent for a cigarette. Unshaved. Poems sticking out of his shoes. The forgotten man. But the crowd's so crazy for blood they'll kill him anyway.”

“Absurd interpretation,” said Welles. “Completely unjustified by the text. A total violation of the spirit of the play, and
yet,
there may be
something
there I can use.
Coulouris!
Where is that—”

George Coulouris entered from stage left. He was a large man, and he wore a green military uniform with a black gun belt across the front. “I thought this was a dress rehearsal,” he said, rubbing lotion into his hands. He disdainfully surveyed the clutter of the stage, the dozen housepainters rolling rust-colored paint on the entire back wall of the theatre. “Of course, the way you continue to cut the text, my character might as well not be in the play at all.”

“Please! Antony's funeral oration is the dramatic centerpiece of
Caesar,”
said Welles. “Every schoolboy in the world knows it. People in the audience will be whispering it with you.”

“If they're still awake after those endless scenes between you and Gabel. Why every Cassius scene should be labored over—every precious, tedious exchange preserved—while the part of Marc Antony, a character universally acknowledged to be the
pivotal
role of the play, should be shorn down to forty lines is something I, of course, will never understand. But Gabel's the director's darling in this piece. Just as Olivier was when we studied together at Elsie Fogerty's Central School for Speech and Drama in London.”

“We're going to record your speech,” said Welles. “These two gentlemen are engineers from Mutual. Of course what's crucial to ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen' is not so much the speech itself, but its effect on your audience.” Welles was suddenly the professor. “You listen. You judge their reactions. You pause. You
tune
them to your ends.”

Coulouris looked at him. “Do you imagine, Orson, you're telling me something I don't know?”

Then somebody was screaming. A painter, stepping back to look at his work, had fallen backwards through one of the open traps. Luckily, there was a mattress down in the cellar.

“That's it!” said Coulouris. “First, you cut my part to shreds; now you're trying to kill us all. I've never in my life been associated with such a ragtag production. Modern dress! We can't
afford
costumes. We can't even afford a stage that isn't gaping with holes.”

“Stage traps are a tradition as old as Shakespeare,” said Welles, “and I would have thought that even Elsie Fogerty's Central School for Speech and Drama in London might have told you that stage traps comprise one of the most basic tools in the—”

“Let's go, Orson,” said a technician.

Welles was suddenly pointing at me. “No kids in this scene. It's a vicious mob. I thought you were out somewhere, learning your lines.”

“I know my lines,” I said.

Welles fell instantly into his Brutus voice. “ ‘Go to the gate. Somebody knocks.' ”

“ ‘Sir, 'tis your brother Cassius,' ” I answered without hesitation. (I was beginning to learn the rules—whoever was the biggest son-of-a-bitch won.)

“ ‘Is he alone?' ”

“ ‘No, sir, there are more with him.' ”

“Not ‘more' with him,” said Welles. “ ‘Moe' with him. This is Shakespearean verse we're speaking. Do you think you can arbitrarily change the words of the world's greatest playwright because you're not comfortable with them?”

“I meant—”

“Go home and learn your lines.”

“I know them.”

“And I say you need
moe
time. We're in one tiny scene, Junior, but remember that tiny scene serves to humanize the entire historical pageant of the play.” Welles was back in the lecture room. “We cry for the death of Brutus because of that one scene. And that beautiful lullaby captures all his inexpressible sadness. A lullaby I interpolated, by the way, from
Henry VIII
, act three, scene one. Now go home and learn your lines. Have we given him the ukulele yet? Sonja! He needs the music for the song. Is there
anyone
here trying to—”

Welles screamed and disappeared down a hole in the stage.

 

I took the 10:07 Hudson Tube home to Newark, then transferred to the local. I sat in the near-empty car strumming my ukulele and softly singing, “Orpheus with his lute . . . .” My ears were ringing with Shakespeare.

Caroline would have finished her performance in
Growing Pains
by now. The little towns passed in the night, the little lives. And here I was, riding this train with a multigraphed script for
Julius Caesar
on the seat next to me, practicing a song that Marc Blitzstein had written for my character—and on Thursday night I might be singing it before an audience of every significant theatre critic in New York City at the debut of the Mercury Theatre.

The voices sounded in my head over the clattering rails: Welles and Houseman and Lloyd and Coulouris and Sonja and Anna Stafford and Orpheus with his lute . . . .

It was midnight, and I was as awake as I'd ever been in my life.

I
t was probably around one in the morning when I got back to Westfield. I walked home from the train station, studying the shuttered, dreaming town: its porches, its nightlights, its wind and leaves and telephone wires. It seemed the quietest place in the world.

“I first met Orson Welles . . .” I began dictating to my interviewer.

A light had been left burning on the porch of my house, and from the street I could see a large garden rake left standing next to the door, a pair of work gloves next to it.

Even at one in the morning my domestic inadequacies spoke loudly.

 

The morning. The phone was ringing downstairs.

It was Caroline.

“I'm sorry I couldn't make it last night,” I began.

“The show was canceled 'cause there was no heat in the building, so you didn't miss anything,” she said.

Who understood the human heart? One day I was ready to write off Caroline as a conspicuously wrong choice, and the next day I'd see her standing there in the sun in her pale yellow angora sweater and matching kneesocks, the light catching her hair, and I'd think: Richard, fall down on your knees and thank God this girl, of her own free will, is actually interested in you.

“And, listen, Richard, Mrs. Giaimo pulled me aside last night—and you can't tell
anybody
this, all right?”

“Who am I going to tell?”

“She said she's thinking about giving me the lead in the spring musical. I have to sing for her and everything; you know, go through all the motions, but she's
certain
it's going to be me—and, you know, Kristina Stakuna is
never
going to forgive me. But it's
so
exciting! I'm not supposed to tell anybody, but I had to tell you. I can't even think about it; it gets me too crazy. So are we getting together today?”

I suddenly knew I wasn't going to tell her about Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre. Not yet. This was
her
moment—her lead in the spring play. And Orson Welles was still too fragile a dream: too impossibly wonderful, too perilous, and too achingly mine to tell anyone yet. When it was absolutely certain I was opening in the show, when it couldn't be canceled, when my part was perfect, and all I had to do was astonish them, then I'd tell them all.

“I think I'm going to be busy today,” I said.

My mother walked into the kitchen. She spoke to me as if I weren't even on the phone. “Are you waiting for your father to pick up those leaves? Is that what you want? Sure, let the horse do it. All week long he works; he kills himself for this family. And you're on that phone day and night.
Sure, let the horse do it.”

“Ma, I'm going to help; I'm on the phone right now.”