Word: houseman
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Cradle Will Rock," a ten-scene satire dealing bitterly with modern industrial strife, was first produced late in 1937 by Orson Welles and John Houseman for the Mercury Theatre in New York. When the Federal Theatre withdrew its sponsorship from the production on the opening night, Welles, Houseman, and the whole cast, followed by an angry crowd of first-nighters, trooped across Manhattan to the Venice Theatre...
...Secretary. "The most Christlike man of his generation," New Dealers gushed when the new Secretary appeared, a simple, heavy man with slept-in looking clothes and a way of saying exactly what he thought. Dressed to the nines for the Inauguration, Henry Wallace plaintively asked his colored houseman. Edward, whether he had to wear clothes like that for every Cabinet meeting. It was told that as a child he loved his dog so deeply that he learned to bark and bury bones; that as an idealistic experimenter he had lost twelve pounds trying to live on a diet of corn...
...advance sale of $8,000 finally saw the Mercury through the opening night of Caesar, which all told cost $16,000 to get under way. After that, finances were a pleasure. Today Welles & Houseman own 70% of the Mercury which, sticking to a $2.20 top, has had an average gross of $6,000 a week, an average...
...Mercury, Houseman runs the business end, Welles is Caesar (not Brutus) where stagecraft is concerned, and in his own opinion "pretty dictatorial." Welles does all cutting and rewriting, and does it with a fearless hand. For the much-applauded episode of Cinna the Poet in Julius Caesar, Welles cooly snitched lines out of Coriolanus. When a Mercury actor was asked when rehearsals on one of the season's classics would begin, he answered: "As soon as Orson has finished writing...
...immediately make money on it or abandon it." How much money Welles is making he will not say. He is not even sure he knows. His habit at the Mercury is to draw "what he needs" from the box onice usually, the box office reports, some $200 a week. Houseman does the same. Says Welles: "Houseman and I aren't making enough money to cheat each other...