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GENIUSES AT LARGE
So I got on a plane to Las Vegas. It was a beautiful, warm evening and from the air Los Angeles looked like a lot of rhinestones that had not yet been assembled into a necklace. Presently everything around us and underneath us was dark and we were over the desert.
We were coming down to land when a bizarre mirage loomed up out of the night : a sky-scraping cut-out of Betty Grable in a swim-suit. It was evident we had arrived.
Later that evening I saw an even stranger vision. Having penetrated the cordon of slot-machines in the lobby of the Riviera Hotel (and fortunately still having enough money left for supper) I was able to see Orson Welles doing Shakespeare as a twice-nightly cabaret — declaiming to the accompaniment of clattering cutlery : "Friends, Romans and countrymen, lend me your ears."
Judging from the number of empty tables the visitors to Las Vegas were more inclined to lend Miss Grable their eyes (at the nearby El Rancho). But I watched and listened intently. It isn't every day that you find a genius.
He was sawing the smoke-filled air with grandiose gestures; his eyes bulged like the bubbles in hot lava; his voice was stereophonic; the sweat poured down his face and neck. . . . He wore a dinner suit that was looking a little crumpled.
When he had finished the speech there was polite applause. It was not exactly an Old Vic audience, but the customers, between mouthfuls of entrecote steak, had been held. The spectacle of a man reciting Shakespeare at a night-club had a certain curiosity-appeal — like bearded ladies and sword swallowers. It was something the customers had not come across before.
Mr. Welles then transformed himself before our eyes into Shylock, donning false nose, applying deft strokes of grease-paint to his face and putting on costume over his dinner suit. The audience thought this absolutely
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