By Stuart Mitchner
On the night of October 15, 1956, viewers of I Love Lucy, the nation’s most popular television show, saw Lucille Ball and Orson Welles doing a scene from Romeo and Juliet. Welles has his doubts, but she’s been showering him with compliments, telling him he’s better than John Gielgud, Maurice Evans, Sir Ralph Richardson, and, after he prompts her, Laurence Olivier. Looking like an adult parody of her Peanuts namesake, Lucy delivers her jawbreaker of a line with outstretched arms, “What man art thou that, thus bescreened in night, so stumblest on my counsel?”
“I know not how to tell you how I am,” the huge, cigar-smoking Romeo tells the hapless Juliet. “My name is hateful to myself. Had I it written, I would tear the word.” When Lucy forgets her next line, he sweeps grandly on to his “favorite scene,” Romeo’s discovery of Juliet’s body, which is when he pulls out the proverbial stops and takes Shakespeare to the sit-com max: “Here, here will I set up my everlasting rest. And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last. Arms, take your last embrace. And lips, oh you the doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss a dateless bargain to engrossing death.”
At this point, after flirting with ham-actor mockery, Welles shifts gears, lowers his voice, and as the camera comes in for a close-up, creates a special moment and inhabits it as though all by himself on another stage in another world: “Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on the dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark! Here’s to my love. O true apothecary, thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.”
Welles’s inspired, half-whispered reading softens the sitcom glare, Ricky is moved, Lucy, too — until she breaks the spell, bellowing a line scripted for a big laugh: “Boy, you’re sure a lot better than Herman Schlup!”
Lucy’s crude, played-for-laughs remark destroys the moment, reducing both Shakespeare and the director of Citizen Kane to a laugh line shared with “Herman Schlup.”
The “Boy Wonder”
How many viewers in the Eisenhower fifties actually comprehended the historic stature of the big man with the big cigar taking up so much space on the small screen? Few, if any, watching the show knew that he’d been seriously committed to Shakespeare since his teenage years at the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois, where he co-edited with headmaster Roger Hill Everybody’s Shakespeare editions of The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, and Twelfth Night, providing set designs and commentaries. Also largely forgotten by then was the triumph of Citizen Kane, the acclaimed 1941 debut of the washed-up “boy wonder” whose latest film Touch of Evil will arrive in 1958, masterfully deranged, reckless, overwrought, and spectacularly directed, with Welles himself as the mountain of corruption at the center, to whom Marlene Dietrich’s gypsy fortune teller says, after telling him he’s had too many candy bars, “You a mess, honey.”
Growing Into Falstaff
Any lover of literature offended by what happened to the Bard that night on I Love Lucy would surely have forgiven Welles after viewing Chimes at Midnight (1966) a decade later, in which he plays Falstaff, magnificently, and with the approval of Harold Bloom, the author of Falstaff: Give Me Life, who calls the film “a neglected masterpiece.”
Of Welles’s Falstaff, Pauline Kael writes in Shakespeare in America (Library of America 2014), he “seems to have grown into his voice; he’s not too young for it anymore, and he’s certainly big enough….He has the eyes for the role. Though his Falstaff is short on comedy, it’s very rich, very full.”
Welles and Pynchon
The man who brought Shakespeare to I Love Lucy was born 110 years ago on May 6, 1915 in Kenosha Wisconsin, one day and 22 years ahead of May 8, 1937’s Thomas Pynchon, whose National Book Award winning novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) contains a cryptic reference to “the Kenosha Kid.” In fact, Welles is never mentioned by name but appears in the guise of a dance step in an exchange of letters between the novel’s hero Tyrone Slothrop, from a London hospital in 1944 (“Did I ever bother you, ever, for anything, in your life?”) and The Kenosha Kid, General Delivery, Kenosha, Wisconsin (“You never did”). The exchange is followed by comments from a “Smartass youth” (“I did all them old-fashioned dances”) and an “Old veteran hoofer” (“Bet you never did the “Kenosha,” kid!”). The broken, sing-song jingle — “You never did the Kenosha Kid. Maybe you did the Philadelphia, rag the Rochester, josh the Joliet. But you never did the Kenosha kid” — follows an injection of Sodium Amytal into Slothrop’s brain leading to his voyage to the excremental depths of a toilet in the Roseland Ballroom and a cameo by “Red,” the shoeshine boy who grows up to be Malcolm X.
Creative Paranoia
In his landmark review of Gravity’s Rainbow, Richard Poirier discusses the way the “persistent paranoia of all the important characters invests any chance detail with the power of an omen, a clue, to which, momentarily, all other details might adhere.” Among “the scores of submerged details” playing on the “creative paranoia” of the reader, Poirier singles out The Kenosha Kid, which he finds to be “a most apt allusion, if one thinks of the hero of Citizen Kane and of how his last word, ‘Rosebud,’ is taken as some clue to the lavish assemblage of his wealth and power, when it is instead the name of a little sled, at the end consigned to junk and fire, that he loved as a boy. Any reference or detail in the book can redeem itself this way.”
So Pynchon didn’t need to mention the Rosebud connection or Orson Welles by name, all it took was the Kenosha Kid and the Roseland Ballroom and a perceptive reviewer.
Jump to 2020
When I googled the Kenosha Kid I came up with Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old who shot three men, two fatally, during a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin in August 2020. Soon to become a hero of the Maga Right, the shooter was actually born in Antioch, near Kenosha. Forty-six miles south along Lake Michigan is the Todd School, where Welles bonded with Shakespeare.
Tearing Stuff Up
For more than a week now, my study has been a bombsite, really as if the cluttered nightmare of the closet archive had taken a direct hit, stacks of manuscripts, novels finished and unfinished, family letters dating back to the 1930s, memorabilia like the 1934 Playbill I wrote about a few weeks ago, photographs of cats, cousins, and ancestors as wild-west funny as a group shot from the Last Chance saloon in Dodge City.
Among the things I just finished tearing up was the 400-plus-page novel I was still working on when I began writing for this newspaper and came to realize that more people would read these weekly columns than would ever have read that book — as one reader in effect reminded me in last week’s Mailbox. She says that sometimes she wished she knew my wife’s name, which I would gladly mention whenever I refer to a film or series or anything else that Leslie and I share, if it didn’t seem awkward and perhaps even indiscreet. Writing about Welles this week reminds me that in our almost six decades of marriage she and I often find ourselves echoing Falstaff and Justice Shallow in the film’s wonderfully Wellesian opening scene: “The days that we have seen, Master Shallow! we have heard the chimes at midnight.”
The Poetry Trail
Leslie and I have also shared many walks on the Scott and Helen McVay Poetry Trail in Green Meadows (not the D&R Greenway Poetry Trail, as I mistakenly referred to it in a recent column). Last week I received a letter from the McVays that also contained some interesting background information about C.K. Williams, whose poem “The Garden” is one I make sure to read every word of every time we walk the trail. Apparently he often walked there during the last years of his life and wanted to be part of it, offering a poem of his the McVays felt “met the spirit of the Trail.”