Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane by McGilligan Patrick

Author:McGilligan, Patrick [McGilligan, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780062112507
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

After a dinner at the photographer Cecil Beaton’s apartment, Orson posed for Beaton—one more signpost on the road to Broadway canonization. The portrait shows the twenty-two-year-old actor-director at a worktable, staring intensely over a Roman bust, with scissors, a thick tome, and a human skull draped with beads. Orson returned the favor by inviting Beaton to create the costumes for his conjoined productions of Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2) and Henry V, now projected as a Mercury offering for the spring of 1938.

Orson was leading a double life in the fall of 1937, reflecting the opposite sides of his persona as a performer: the Shakespearean sophisticate and the cheerful vulgarian. While appearing nightly as Brutus in Julius Caesar, he was also appearing frequently (and anonymously) on The March of Time, and, more important, purring to life every Sunday night as the Shadow.

The Shadow was his dream role. The job required little forethought, and on this show—unlike The March of Time and his other bill-paying radio gigs—he was treated as the most important person in the room. The very first script draft was forwarded to him in New Hampshire for approval, and later episodes were messengered to his Mercury Theatre office, where he marked them up with cuts and improvements. And part of the Shadow job was doubling as a pitchman, warning motorists on behalf of Goodrich Tires about roads in treacherous weather.

On Sundays, he often arrived at the studio not having glimpsed the final draft of the script—not even knowing the outcome of the plot. He later said this enhanced the program’s feeling of suspense, quickening his performance along with that of the other actors. He sometimes showed up just minutes before the red light blinked on at 5:30 P.M., striding to the microphone with his usual bounce and roll, just as the mysterioso music faded away, to intone the famous opening: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men . . . ?”

He played the Shadow with a flippancy that kept the other participants on their toes. In the same breath he seemed both to relish and to mock his hokey dialogue. His irony and good humor were infectious. “One time he got to the middle break,” recalled actor and writer Sidney Slon, “and he said, ‘Hey, this is a hell of a script. How does it end?’ ” Another time, Orson rushed breathlessly into the studio and dashed up to the microphone, whipping out his copy of the script so fast the pages flew out of his hands and fanned onto the floor. “There was consternation in the control room,” recalled series announcer Ken Roberts. “Fear on the faces of the musicians. Everybody was terribly upset. Suddenly, Orson merely smiled, reached into his pocket and took out another script. The whole thing had been planned to frighten the director.”

The series pitted the Shadow’s powers of hypnosis and telepathy against deadly criminals, who were often deranged, fanatical, or endowed with superpowers. Orson never wrote or directed

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