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By MIKE TEAL
75 years ago, on 31 March 1940, Orson Welles’s production of Jane Eyre was broadcast on The Campbell Playhouse, CBS-Radio. Madelline Carroll played the title role and Welles played Jane’s moody and mysterious employer, Edward Fairfax Rochester of Thornfield. It was the last show of The Campbell Playhouse, a series of some sixty one-hour dramatizations that represented the peak of Orson Welles’s power and influence in the medium of radio. He would continue to do wonderful things in various shows and series on the air for the next fifteen years, but never with such a large and sustained national audience as this.
It’s predecessor, The Mercury Theatre On The Air had had a run of twenty-two programs, from July to November of 1938, including the infamous The War of the Worlds broadcast. It was the notoriety of this broadcast in particular, that had attracted Campbell’s since, as John Houseman put it, “if Welles could make Martians credible, he could make Chicken Soup credible too.” It was Welles’s first big compromise with a sponsor, meaning less freedom in his choice of topics, but more money for the productions.
As Frank Brady points out in Citizen Welles, in between the time Campbell’s announced their sponsorship and the time they took over, Welles wrapped up The Mercury Theatre on the Air by doing many of the planned adaptations “that he felt would not be acceptable to the new sponsors because of their content or classical appeal.”
However, the new sponsor was very pleased with the first Campbell Playhouse broadcast of Daphne DuMaurrier’s bestseller Rebecca in early December 1938, and as The Encyclopedia of Orson Welles indicates:
“As the (Campbell) series unfolded, thanks to a sponsor willing to pay for high-profile guests, Welles shared the Campbell microphone with such stars as Lawrence Olivier, Lucille Ball, Katherine Hepburn, Noah Beery, Gertrude Berg, Ida Lupino and Helen Hayes. The series helped catapult Welles to even greater heights of celebrity.”
Simon Callow in Road To Xanadu notes, “Radio does have a tremendous advantage for an actor in that it is possible to play roles that you could by no stretch of the imagination essay on stage; thus Welles played Elyot in Private Lives (opposite Gertrude Lawrence) and Vincent Price’s old role of Prince Albert, opposite Helen Hayes as Queen Victoria. He returned to Les Miserables, this time as Javert to Walter Huston’s Valjean, and played the Stage Manager in his old friend Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.”
Still, it was a grueling experience for the young Welles, who was at the same time struggling to keep the stage branch of the Mercury Theatre afloat, after a disaster-filled second season, which was a complete turnaround from their spectacular first season of 1937. Welles was also beginning to field offers from Hollywood, which would eventually result in a contract with RKO studio, and the making of the great Citizen Kane.
Trying to juggle three different careers in three different media meant frequent exhaustion, harried nerves and testy relations with Campbell’s, which resented Welles commuting back and forth between New York and Hollywood. Eventually, the sponsor relented, and gave Welles permission to broadcast the Campbell shows from California. Welles also came to resent the occasional “blu-pencilling” of the Mercury scripts, and commented how he was “sick of seeing the heart torn out of a script through censorship”.
Despite all these tensions, it is remarkable how good The Campbell Playhouse shows are, and despite the occasional nod to the current bestsellers of the time, the staggering range of the Mercury Theatre remained on full display. Dramas, adventures, screwball comedies, crime thrillers, high-toned theatre classics, Welles and the Mercury Theatre did it all, and did it superbly too. The Campbell Playhouse is one of the main examples of the kind of artist Orson Welles might have become had he been willing to play ball with sponsors and other money people. But artistic compromise was not part of Welles’s character, as he bravely struggled for much of the rest of his amazing life and career to maintain the purity of personal vision. One might argue that The Campbell Playhouse represents the proverbial “road not taken” in Welles’s career.
But there is little question that it had a profound influence on his art nonetheless. As The Encyclopedia of Orson Welles sums it up, “In retrospect, the 61 episodes of The Campbell Playhouse constitute a watershed for radio drama, and for Welles, whose sense of dramatic storytelling was broadened by the experience.”
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A listing of Campbell Playhouse broadcasts may be found online at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Campbell_Playhouse
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