Customer Reviews

Me and Orson Welles: A Novel

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I've read a lot of books recently, but I don't think there's one that can top "Me and Orson Welles" for the sheer pleasure it provided. This is a classic, wonderful, coming-of-age story, set in the New York City of 1937. Richard Samuels is a 17-year-old high school student with a big heart and big dreams. Through lucky happenstance, he lands a small part in "Julius Caesar," the opening Broadway production for the Mercury Theatre and its star, 22-year-old Orson Welles.

I'm not a Welles scholar by any means, but have read several biographies of the man, and would say the outsized figure who strides through these pages rings true. Yet for all his manic genius, Welles never steals center stage from our hero, Richard, who we quickly learn has a greater soul, if perhaps a lesser talent. Joseph Cotten, John Houseman, Norman Lloyd and the other famous Mercury names come to life in the story as well. You will feel yourself in their midst, feel the great tensions leading up to that all-so-important opening night, revel in their triumphs, share in their disappointments.

This will sound like a cliché, I know...but I laughed out loud (a lot); I came close to crying a couple of times; and I closed the book with a real sense of disappointment that it was over, but grateful to have recaptured a wonderful feel for that time in life when everything seems magical and new and anything seems to be possible.--William C. Hall

I bought this novel after reading the excellent review in Entertainment Weekly last week. It really deserves it. The book is quirky, absorbing, and totally original. It puts you right into the heart of a moment in history. That whole world of New York in the 1930's comes alive: the neon signs, the slang, the tempo. And by the time the story's done, you feel as if you've lived through it all yourself. The feeling is exhilarating and terrifying and hilarious.

A coming of age tale is a coming of age tale and there are certain basic steps in the formula that must be adhered to (the fascinating "older" woman; the "exotic" experience outside of the hero's family's ken, etc.), and Kaplow adheres to them. However, and this is a big however, this book's exotic experience is the staging of Orson Welles' 1938 production of "Julius Caesar" and Kaplow's evocation of that time and place, while not always completely historically accurate is always completely fascinating, funny, suspenseful, and enthralling.
One minor carp to the author; Les Tremayne, one of the great radio actors of the time, was not "short and dumpy". While I can't attest to his height, his appearence in over 50 films and innumerable TV shows will attest to his slim, elegant look complete with dapper mustache.
A minor, but peerhaps telling point considering that the book reads like a memoir and was written by someone obviously to young to be its protagonist.

(...)

Robert Kaplow's Me and Orson Welles is not a coming of age story. It's a Manhattan tale of an age that slipped through our fingers. A Times Square that only exists in the memory of old Broadway troopers, colored in with characters straight from the files of a dozen or so New York newspapers that have met their own expiration dates. But this book, the story of how Richard Samuels, a New Jersey teenager manages to brass his way into Orson Welles' avant garde 1937 production of Julius Caesar and then survive for seven full days is every bit the Broadway tale. Come along and listen to Kaplow's lullaby of Broadway as seen through Richie Samuels's eyes. This is the Broadway that Damon Runyon wrote about in "Guys and Dolls". And while Richie is working his bit part with the great Orson Welles, you can be sure that not far away, Sammy Glick from Budd Shulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? is conning his way from copyboy to Hollywood. It might seem a bit unorthodox to mention Runyon or Shulberg's classics but author Robert Kaplow has recreated the Manhattan they described so superbly and then dropped Richie Samuels right into it. This author is masters of subtext because you know what the major characters like Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton and John Houseman will go on to do in later years. We, the readers, know the secret and we relish in it every bit as much as Walter Winchell might bark, "Wynta gimmee a few words?" This is young Richie Samuels, who knows everything there is to know about the theatre, names of all the greats and the shows in which they appeared as well as the songs they sang. This is young Richie Samuels slickly conning his way out of high school classes to be at rehearsals where Welles thunders across the stage, raging at John Houseman who is slowly losing his mind to keep the star happy and productive. And as much as Richie Samuels believes he can learn from Orson Welles, we can forsee the future that he can't possibly know. We can see Welles frightening the country with his 1938 radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds" while further down the career path, "Citizen Kane" is just dying to be lifted from the dark heart of William Randolph Hearst. We can almost imagine Richie, many years later, turning on his television set to find a much heavier Welles in his famed wine commercials.

With all that said, this is Richie Samuels's week. The seven days in his life where he coldly makes the decisions that place him onto a career path. That's one reason this is not a coming of age story. Richie knows exactly what he is going to do. He never blunders into it. He is determined to stay on the stage with Welles and if that means lying to his parents, getting other kids at school to lie for him so he can cut classes and generally just obscure his Manhattan melodrama until he's ready to spring it on friends and family, he's very up to the challenge. Naturally, Richie's momentum stumbles a bit when falls in love with Sonja, an enigmatic beauty that every man in the cast wants to bed. Just the scent of her walking by Richie and Joseph Cotton launches the two men into a sex talk that sounds more like father and son than a laundry list of conquests. He learns the softness of love from Sonja while absorbing the power of an actor coming into bloom from Welles. The chemistry of these two merging within Richie, during the seven days he worked at the Mercury Theatre on West Forty-first Street, bring him the strength to face Welles when he realizes that the star can be unduly cruel to the people around him.

Robert Kaplow's, Me and Orson Welles is a story that we'd fully expect to see on the screen. It's the powerful type of story that HBO does so well. And, it's a lot of fun! Pick up a copy and turn some pages.

I've been a huge fan of actor / writer / director Orson Welles ever since the first time I saw his terrific, groundbreaking debut film, Citizen Kane and heard him on old-time radio as The Shadow. After I'd watched all his films I could find, and listened to all his radio appearances I could get my hands on (two things I'm still achieving, albeit at a much slower rate than at the beginning), I started on books featuring the man himself.

I read biographies, criticism, and, most recently, novels featuring him as a main character, like Max Allan Collins' The War of the Worlds Murder. The latest on my list of Wellesian fiction: Robert Kaplow's terrific coming-of-age historical novel, Me and Orson Welles. Here is the endlessly intriguing opening paragraph (so much so, it is used on the back-cover blurb):

"This is the story of one week in my life. I was seventeen. It was the week I slept in Orson Welles's pajamas. It was the week I fell in love. It was the week I fell out of love. And it was the week I changed my middle name -- twice."

Kaplow lets you know right away that Me and Orson Welles is a book that is going to cover a lot of ground in a short time (and relatively few pages). I dove right in.

It is a golden age of Broadway -- the era of Kaufman, Rodgers, Porter, Berlin, Gielgud, and Barrymore. But there's one rising star who is determined to outshine them all: Orson Welles. With his "Voodoo Macbeth" (with its all-black cast) a huge success, its newly famous director prepares to capitalize on his popularity with his new Mercury Theatre (the novel features John Houseman, Joseph Cotten, Norman Lloyd, and George Coulouris among others as supporting characters) modern-dress version of Julius Caesar (with himself as Brutus).

But here I am babbling on about Orson Welles when the real star of Me and Orson Welles is the "Me" of the title. Richard Samuels is a seventeen-year-old aspiring actor and student of record (the long-playing kind, that is -- his favorite is a recording of John Gielgud playing Hamlet) who lucks into the part of Lucius in Welles' new production. It is a chance happening that changes his life in many ways, as he learns a lot about the unpredictability of creative people.

I first came into contact with Robert Kaplow's work through his gloriously bawdy parody of the mystery genre (and one author in particular), The Cat Who Killed Lilian Jackson Braun. Needless to say (though I'll say it anyway), Me and Orson Welles is nothing like that book. In fact, it is often hard to see how they could have been written by the same author, a fact I always find fascinating in a time where authors are practically required to keep churning out the same book time and again just to continue being published. Kudos to Kaplow for getting his name in different sections of the bookstore.

For a book that is being marketed as Young Adult fiction (though this is likely just because of the age of the protagonist), Kaplow shows no qualms at discussing sex frankly. In his search for romance among theatricals, Richard laments how he is seen as harmless by the opposite sex (something this reviewer can regrettably relate to). This relatability makes the reader want to root for Richard's success in everything he tries. Kaplow mixes humor and pathos deftly, and captures the period and the theatrical environment impeccably (I assume he must have at least some acting experience), culminating in a moving portrait of a week in the life of a character who begins the week a boy and ends it a man.

This is a deeply absorbing and wonderfully funny novel that imagines Orson Welles at the beginning of his astonishing career and a young man's perilous collision with Mr. Welles' Size 61 Ego. It's extremely entertaining, and you really feel you are there on West 41st Street with the whole crew. A dazzling piece of sustained literary imagination.

I just read that this title was selected by BOOKSENSE for their November/December top-ten recommendations, and I completely agree with their selection. I've been teaching JULIUS CAESAR for more than a decade, and I think I've been waiting for a novel like this for a decade. I'm ordering a class-set to go along with my unit on CAESAR. It makes the play come alive. More than that, it makes theater come alive. It is also funny as hell. And I think it shows that being young and ambitious and dreaming of glory is timeless.

I read the starred review this novel got from Kirkus Reviews ("Joyful and alive, crackling with wonder.") and, as a fan of All Things Orson, I've been waiting for it with great expectations. I'm pleased to report it's wonderful! It's most brilliant device, I think, is that Welles is a secondary character, not the lead. This lets the narrator, as well as the reader, take an objective and wide-eyed view of the tale. And what a tale it is! I was reading this book, which is really a long countdown to opening night of the Mercury Theatre, and I found my heart was beating faster. Really! My pulse was racing; I was nervous, and this was for a production that opened sixty-six years ago! That's the magic of this novel. You are really there! You befriend Orson Welles. And you share this funny, funny and occasionally poignant rollercoaster ride. And what a damn great movie this would make!

While browsing around my local bookstore yesterday I came across "Me and Orson Welles". The blurbs on the back cover sounded intriguing so I took the plunge, bought it and read it. Wow!

Robert Kaplow (aka Richard Kenneth Samuels) wonderfully splits this story between the two protagonists, Samuels and Welles. While a chance meeting brings them together, Kaplow leaves it to Welles, the more brutally dark of the two, to command center stage as he directs everyone around him, both onstage and off. His play, "Caesar", is in fact his life, and Richard is drawn into the maelstrom as Welles deftly maneuvers his younger charge. There are surprises at almost every turn, which turn out to be less surprising as the layers of the "real" Orson Welles are peeled away. As Richard becomes more involved in his week with Welles he also becomes stronger and more assured and the book leads up to a dramatic climax that ends with great satisfaction.

"Me and Orson Welles" is a stunningly well-written book, nicely paced and told with great insight into the human condition. I highly recommend it.

This book is for adults but would be a great read for older teens. It is set in 1937 New York, and Richard Samuels is a 17 year old who can't get any attention at school, least of all from girls. But that's ok, because Richard knows one day he'll be a famous actor. That day turns out to be very soon. Richard happens to meet a loud young man on the street named Orson Welles. Orson is a 22 year old mad genius about to direct Julius Caesar, and he casts Richard in his play. Quickly Richard becomes involved in the world of Broadway, with its beautiful young starlets, Orson brown-nosers, New Yorker critics, and torrid affairs. Richard ditches school to devote his all to the play and to Orson, who he idealizes. But Richard's dreams of fame and riches may come to a crashing halt as he discovers that being close to Orson Welles also means that you'll be run over by the bulldozer that is his ego.

For any fan of Orson Welles or WWII era historical fiction, this is a short, fun novel about a what-if situation of a young boy's dreams of stardom alongside Orson Welles.