Orson Welles, Volume 3 by Simon Callow

Author:Simon Callow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-03-16T11:32:55+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Orson Welles, Television Needs You

AS IF deliberately tipping his hat at George Jean Nathan, Welles’s next engagement after King Lear closed was to perform a scene from the play (with cast) on the Ed Sullivan Show, alongside Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, a ventriloquist, the Four Ames Brothers, Rodgers and Hammerstein. As if that were not enough variety, the day following the Sullivan Show he went straight to Las Vegas, where for three weeks he filled the Riviera Hotel’s Clover Room with an ambitious act which was an unqualified success; unqualified successes came rarely in Welles’s life. The initial impulse was, inevitably, economic: though he had cost the City Center dearly, his own salary had been a token $85 a week; with a new daughter to maintain, he needed serious money – and quickly. Welles had been alerted to the fact that the Mafiosi who had turned the formerly staid desert resort into Sin City had begun to pay big bucks to big-name entertainers. This turned out to be no exaggeration: he was offered $45,000 for the three-week engagement, which was due to start on 25 February. According to Daily Variety, the Riviera Hotel’s new entertainment director (whose predecessor had been blown up in his car by a dynamite bomb placed there by his employers) had asked Welles what kind of an act he had in mind. ‘Don’t you worry, Mr Goffstein,’ Welles had replied. ‘It will be the most dramatic performance ever presented in Las Vegas’ – which strongly suggests he hadn’t thought about it yet.

Needless to say, he was delighted to have the opportunity to present himself before the public as a magician – the favourite, he always claimed, of his many manifestations; over the half-decade since he had last performed a conjuring trick in public, he had religiously kept au fait with the latest developments. But he was not just offering magic – he had a killer card up his sleeve, which none of his rivals could provide: readings from Shakespeare. In short, it was An Evening with Orson Welles by another name. He was very relaxed about it. He got a nasty shock when he, Paola and Beatrice arrived in Las Vegas and he saw the Clover Room, which was to the average cabaret venue what the City Center was to a telephone box. It was vast – far too big for the modest array of mentalist tricks he’d planned. The show was due to open in three days: he moved quickly, and soon enough, through his extensive magic network, he found the help he needed. The Kirkhams, Kirk and Phyllis, performers and innovators themselves, supplied him with the big illusions he knew he required and were contracted to assist him on stage during the act. He selected three of their biggest illusions: the Broom Suspension, the Temple of Benares and the immortally named Duck Vanish, and, under Kirkham’s tutelage, he quickly mastered them.

When Welles stumbled upon the Clover Room’s state-of-the-art revolving stage, he seized on

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