Orson Welles, Vol I Page 13

  Perhaps that’s what Edwards said after the first audition. Either way, his words were worth their weight in gold. Orson somehow knew in his genes what all amateur actors know: ham acting, a style which they cannot possibly have seen practised on any professional stage, harking back as it does to the start of the melodrama of the previous century. But his physique, voice and personality rendered it more striking than it would have been in most people. Edwards’s advice was perfectly judged; to the extent he was prepared to take it, Orson was a good, and sometimes a superb, actor. It, and whatever other advice he received during his time at the Gate, was the only training he ever received.

  Later it became very important for Welles to believe that he had strolled into the Gate, claimed to be a star of the Theatre Guild, and immediately been awarded a starring role. He wanted to suggest that he had never really had any ambitions as an actor; that becoming one was all an accident. This is, at first glance, rather modest of him. What it actually betokens is a desire to affirm his universal giftedness, but also to avoid being judged too harshly: after all, folks, I just kind of drifted into this. He told David Frost: ‘I had no desire to be an actor. If I had, I would have said: “Could I have a spear to hold?” But it was ridiculous that I would be an actor, so I just said: “I am a leading actor.” I played a star part the first time I ever walked on stage and I’ve been working my way down ever since.’ Even more grandly, he told Peter Bogdanovich, ‘I said I was a star already. I lied like a maniac … I was from America, and in Ireland, back in those distant days, anything American was possible. I informed the directors of the Gate Theatre that I was that same Welles they must have read about. Just for the lark of it, I told them I’d enjoy the experience of playing with their company for a play or two – that is, if any leading roles were available.’6

  At the time, of course, it was a different matter: ‘need I tell you,’ he wrote Skipper Hill, ‘how happy I am in the arrangement? Here is the opportunity I have been praying for.’ Sometimes in later years his common sense baulked at the idea of a shrewd and cosmopolitan man of the theatre like Hilton Edwards believing that a sixteen-year-old lad was a Broadway star: he told Dilys Powell in the sixties that ‘Hilton can’t have swallowed all that, but he was nice enough to pretend to, and he did start me at the top with leading roles.’ But later, when Leslie Megahey asked him, on BBC television, ‘is it reasonably true that you claimed to be a big star?’ Orson replied: ‘Yeah, I did. And what’s true is that Hilton believed me.’ Eventually, in his frustration at the persistence of scepticism about this crucial part of his myth, he played his usual trump card: the lie audacious. Of Mac Liammóir’s account in All for Hecuba he said (also on the BBC): ‘It’s a wonderful description, when you consider that the author was in London at the time this was happening in Dublin. Micheál was in London the first six weeks that I was in Dublin and I got my job only with Hilton and Micheál never saw any of the stuff he writes about.’ During this period, far from being in London, Mac Liammóir was playing the leading part in The Melians; when that failed he revived the Capek brothers’ R.U.R., translated Arms and the Man into Gaelic and directed it, and designed and built the set for Jew Süss. It can hardly have been possible to fail to bump into him wherever you turned at the Gate that September. And no decisions affecting the theatre were ever unilateral; Mac Liammóir and Edwards were involved in everything at every level, and both would have expected to approve Charlie Margood’s replacement.

  The crucial thing about Orson for both Micheál and Hilton was that someone of real force of personality had entered their lives. As an actor, assuming he could be contained, he was exactly what they had been waiting for. In All for Hecuba, Mac Liammóir laments that ‘everywhere in Dublin among the younger members of the profession, among the students, the amateurs, the boys and the girls who want to go on the stage, one found the same complacent apathy, the same cheerful and careless approach, the same lack of passion. They showed it in their pleasant, untroubled faces, in their heavy hands, in their cheerful, colourless voices, in the prim lines of their bodies and feet. One looked in vain for some young ardent face, for an eye that showed a dilated pupil, for a quivering nostril; one listened for a catch in the breath, a break in the voice; one waited for a sudden smile, a nervous frown, for any unexpected small sign; but no, they were nice fellows and charming girls, and there was the end of them.’ Orson was an answer to prayer. ‘We found … a very tall young man with a chubby face, full powerful lips, and disconcerting Chinese eyes … the voice, with its brazen transatlantic sonority, was already that of a preacher, a leader, a man of power; it bloomed and boomed its way through the dusty air of the scene dock as though it would crush down the little Georgian walls and rip up the floor; he moved in a leisurely manner from foot to foot and surveyed us with magnificent patience as though here was our chance to do something beautiful at last – yes, sir – and were we going to take it? … and all this did not come from mere youth … but from some ageless and superb inner confidence that no one could blow out. It was unquenchable. That was his secret. He knew that he was precisely what he himself would have chosen to be had God consulted him on the subject at his birth.’

  His conversation was hardly a disappointment, either: ‘I’ve just told Mr Edwards some of the things I’ve done, Mr MacL’móir,’ he said, ‘but I haven’t told him everything; there wouldn’t be time. I’ve acted with the Guild. I’ve written a couple of plays. I’ve toured the States as a sword-swallowing female impersonator. I’ve flared through Hollywood like a firecracker. I’ve lived in a little tomato-coloured house on the Great Wall of China for two dollars a week. I’ve wafted my way with a jackass through Connemara. I’ve eaten dates all over the burning desert and crooned Delaware squaws asleep with Serbian rhapsodies. But I haven’t told you everything. No; there wouldn’t be time.’ Mac Liammóir’s ‘almost totally inaccurate report of his monologue’, as he admitted, none the less has an authentic ring to it. ‘And then he threw back his head and laughed, a frenzy of laughter that involved a display of small white teeth, a buckling up of the eyes into two oblique slits, a perplexed knitting of the sparse darkly coloured brows, and a totally unexpected darting forth of a big pale tongue.’

  The physical impact of Orson Welles, a thing attested to again and again, has rarely been more vividly evoked than here. The sexual undercurrent in Mac Liammóir’s account is not exclusive to those, like him, of homosexual persuasion. Orson, young and old, had a way of invading you that was nothing to do with the sheer size of him, but to do rather with a knack of immediate intimacy that was one of his greatest assets. Mac Liammóir and Edwards were far from unaware of or indifferent to the sexual charm of this sixteen-year-old; but that, too, was part of his impact as an actor. The pressing question now was, precisely: could he be contained – either as an actor or as a person?

  He had, by luck, or destiny, stumbled upon an extraordinary theatre, and two formidable men whom he would continue to know until the end of his life. It was not, and never would be, an uncomplicated relationship, but in some ways they, and their theatre, formed him. Mac Liammóir was, to the naked eye, the more extraordinary of the two, at the age of thirty-one sporting a jet-black toupee of rather uncertain fit, his face painted with a fine layer of flesh-toned greasepaint, eyes lined with kohl, a touch of rouge on either cheek. It was as if he were permanently onstage, attempting to play a juvenile lead in front of a groundrow of footlights. This is perhaps what a contemporary journalist meant in describing him as ‘an Irishman of the high art type’. Despite all this – certainly not because of it – he was strikingly handsome, beautiful even, in a sultry, Spanish sort of a way. Hilton was as English as a side of beef, his head like an elephant’s, small-eyed, with an olfactory organ of uncommon dimensions. He claimed that when he gave talks at girls’ schools, he used, to avoid the snickering that his face provoked, to deliver his words from behind a screen. To all intents and purposes he was bluff and business-like. What, people would won
der, could possibly have brought these two men together? The answer is simple: love – for the theatre, and, above all, for each other. Initially a sexual passion, it had quickly modulated into a marriage of minds and hearts, fuelled by stupendous rages and fierce protective urges. In the end, perhaps, their greatest achievement was the relationship itself; but the Gate was their child.

  They had met in the fit-up company of Mac Liammóir’s brother-in-law, the legendary Anew McMaster, immortalised in Harold Pinter’s memoir Mac: the last, probably, of that breed of touring actor-manager who banged around the countryside (of Ireland, mostly, in his case) playing the great classical roles in productions graced with maximum light and minimum design, in which, night after night and to barely literate audiences, they stormed the heavens, unleashing prodigies of emotional and physical power. Mac was the greatest of all these. Hilton had joined his company from the Old Vic where he had played middle-ranking roles; it was simply another stepping-stone in his career, whereas Micheál was in the process of reinventing himself. If Welles over the years tried to rewrite his own history in public, Micheál Mac Liammóir had gone further down that road than would be thought possible. Born Alfred Willmore, in North London, the son of Kentish people, he had become a child actor, the most successful of his time, playing Oliver Twist to Beerbohm Tree’s Fagin in the West End of London. When his voice broke, he spent a year in Spain, then came back to England to study art at the Slade College. He was successful in his new métier (The Star: ‘To have attained some measure of success both as an actor and as an artist, is an achievement beyond the powers of the average youthful prodigy … 3 weeks ago a clever drawing from his pen appeared in Punch … and he is still in knickerbockers, a merry boy, with tousled hair and inky fingers’), but while he was studying, he became possessed by a new enthusiasm: Ireland and the Irish language. Inspired by what he had seen of Ireland when touring there but above all by Yeats’s exhortations to the new artists of Ireland, he learned the language, and determined to become Irish. First he settled in Howth with his ailing cousin Máire; then they toured Europe together as she moved from one sanatorium; eventually they returned to Ireland, where she died. Micheál (having rechristened himself several times) took the final form of his name, like a nun taking the veil, and shyly resumed his old trade of acting in the shelter of his brother-in-law’s company. He now boasted a complete command of the Irish language and a rich accent that became the epitome of an Irish acting voice, though in truth it was unlike any Irish voice to be heard in the streets – and certainly not the streets of what he now claimed was his native city, Cork.

  He was by temperament emotional, intuitive and impulsive; sexually compulsive; a dreamer, a poet, and glorious company – funny, fantastical, eloquent and inescapably exotic. As an actor he was equipped with a slight, graceful physique, a viola voice darkened by sixty cigarettes a day, and a distinct charisma. He was also prone on stage to self-hypnosis, bewitched by his own cadences, and to a certain overemphasis of his profile. There was vanity there, but also a spellbinding mystery that was his soul’s natural element. Hard in writing of Micheál not to talk of soul.

  Hilton, as far as his background was concerned, was what he seemed (though ironically he did have a strain of Irish blood in him). Onstage he was a solid, experienced English actor, powerful of lung, intelligent and authoritative. But his appearance and manner belied his soul – otherwise how could Micheál and he have been together? Behind the effectiveness and the efficiency lay a passionate, wildly fluctuating nature, prone to despair. Micheál calls his temperament Russian. Welles described him in a letter as ‘our dynamic, hot-tempered and golden-hearted Lord of Lords’. Even at sixteen, Welles was well enough experienced in emotional politics not to have been overwhelmed by the tornado that Micheál and Hilton together constituted; but it is to be wondered how much input a youthful psyche can endure. His capacity was unusually high. He wrote to Skipper that ‘there’s not a “ham” nor an “arty” among us. I really didn’t think such a company existed – where people were serious-minded and highly intelligent and well-educated and combined those virtues with the more cardinal sense of humour – wholesomeness – and a rationality and sense of value.’ Wholesomeness is an unexpected word to come across in this context – Micheál took a demonic delight in outraging conventional expectation (‘have you never been to bed with a woman, then, Mr Mac Liammóir?’ asked a journalist, to which he replied that he’d been accused of a lot of things, ‘but never of being a Lesbian’) – but basic decency was at the heart of their lives and work. ‘We are a kind of Irish Theatre Guild – that is to say an Art Theatre on a commercial basis,’ Welles wrote, and so they were, up to a point.

  ‘We wanted,’ wrote Hilton only a couple of years later, ‘a first-hand knowledge of the new methods of presentation discovered by the Continental experimental theatres. We wanted ourselves to discover new forms. We wanted to revive, or at least take advantage of, and learn from the best of the discarded old traditions. And, not least, we wanted to put at the disposal of our audiences all the riches of the theatre, past, present and future, culled from the theatres of all the world and irrespective of their nationality. A theatre limited only by the limits of the imagination. In spite of all the efforts of pioneers … Appia, Craig … and except for … the work of such producers as Robert Atkins and Théodore Komisarjevsky, the contemporary theatre of Europe was still in the thraldom of naturalism … the art of the theatre has become indistinguishable from the art of the camera.’7

  This is very interesting in the light of Orson Welles’s subsequent career in the theatre: he too was enamoured of experiment; he too associated this with a return to the past. Aware of the encroachment of the moving picture, Hilton described the theatre’s unique contribution: ‘when the theatre once again makes its audience conscious of the presence of its art, people will go to the theatre to see and hear a theatrical performance, and to the cinema to see a cinematic one. The theatre will be the theatre precisely because it is theatrical.’8 From an entirely different (specifically, an aesthetic rather than a political) perspective, the Gate Theatre arrived at a philosophy similar to Brecht’s, rejecting the creeping naturalism of the 1880s which, paradoxically, became the territory of the movies. ‘The theatre,’ Hilton wrote, ‘has lost the individuality it once had; therefore we seek, not for something new, but for something once possessed and now mislaid, and that is the conscious realisation of the presence of the audience … the stage picture must step once more out of its frame and become three dimensional; and it must live, not by its semblance of reality but because it is reality – real actors speaking real words to real audiences. There is your realism for you, whatever the method of its presentation.’9

  Welles, in the mid-sixties, said of Hilton and Micheál: ‘They gave me an education. Whatever I know about any of the stage arts today is only an extension of what I first knew from them.’10 He learned his lessons well, but the substance of his thinking was formed here. The Gate was only three years old when Welles arrived; the ideas that lay behind it were still fresh. They were still fulfilling their manifesto, consciously opposing themselves to the Abbey Theatre, now no longer the poets’ theatre of Yeats’s dream, though he was still running it. They disdained that theatre’s present policy of ‘peasant and other domestic dramas’ performed in an acting style that according to Micheál was merely ‘behaving – their behaviour was Irish and not English, but neither was it acting’.11 The Gate believed fundamentally in Coquelin’s dictum that ‘the arts differ according to the nature of their medium; well, the actor’s medium is – himself.’ Micheál had his own variation: ‘The actor works with himself as surely as a philosopher does with his brain, or a prostitute with her body.’12 The crucial word is work. However exotic a bloom Micheál’s personality may have been, it was the outcome of strenuous and continuing cultivation, pushed so that it was naturally and fluently able to express more and more interesting states of being; and this it was that they both tr
ied to impress on the sixteen-year-old barbarian who had just joined their company. High spirits and a striking presence were not enough.

  Rehearsals with Welles were alternately inspiring and dismaying: ‘There were moments that held one breathless with excitement, and there were sometimes hours together when we would look dumbly at one another with pursed lips and wagging heads thinking, “This sort of thing will never do.”’13 The role of Karl Alexander is not without its pitfalls, to put it mildly. Welles was right to describe it as the fattest of the two parts in the play – ‘it runs the gauntlet of fine temper scenes, drunks, daring seductions, rapine, murder, heart attacks and death.’14 Adapted by Ashley Dukes from Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel, it is the story of how a rich and cultured Jew assists to power the minor nobleman Karl Alexander, distantly related to the incumbent Duke. Enthroned, Karl Alexander depends entirely on the Jew, until he turns against him, tracking him down in his private hide-away. Discovering that Süss has a daughter, he attempts to rape her. She evades him, but in so doing, she falls from an upper window and dies. The Jew has his revenge which precipitates Karl Alexander’s heart attack. Süss is taken away to his death. – The play (‘a tragic comedy’) is, unlike the novel, melodrama. The whole interest lies in the character of the main antagonists. Had the actor playing the Duke failed, the play would have failed, for all that Süss is the central character. Süss watches, comments, flicks a scene this way and that. Even in extremity, his passion is controlled, filtered through thought. Matheson Lang, with his extraordinary presence and other-worldly voice had managed the two sides of Süss – cunning sophisticate and deeply religious father – with notable success in the London première; but it was Frank Harvey as Karl Alexander who had made it possible. The role, Orson accurately observed in a letter home, is ‘all positives’. Unexpectedly he adds ‘I prefer dealing with negations’ – a reference, I suspect, to his shrewd awareness that in a role like that of the Duke, one can do all the work while allowing the other actor quietly to steal all the glory (particularly since Hilton was playing the Jew).