Orson chafed at Bourbon’s micromanagement, but he strove to react responsibly. Sometimes he was defiant and outraged; at other times he tried to be diplomatic. Some shows were personal triumphs, such as the October 22 presentation of “The Magnificent Ambersons,” a rough draft for the future film, with Orson playing the spoiled, tragic George Amberson Minafer. But too many were battles royal, and the fun and joy of the Campbell series were soon bled out of it.
Hollywood had greeted Welles politely, if not warmly, on his arrival in the summer. By September, though, the camps had begun to form. The inflated references to his contract took their toll, as did frequent mentions of his “innumerable yes-men” (by columnist Jimmie Fidler), the “strolling players from New York” always trailing him (by Sidney Skolsky), and his pack of “stooges” (by E. V. Durling). Offbeat publicity events staged by RKO (such as a press party at Shirley Temple’s house where he and the child star played croquet) vied with columns like Jack Sher’s reporting his tantrums.
In his first interview with the Los Angeles Times, Welles spoke less about film than about theater, insisting that the money he earned in Hollywood would be invested in “the further development of the Mercury Theatre.” His attachment to theater made him seem almost averse to motion pictures. More than once Welles floated the likelihood of rejoining Broadway after he finished his first picture, as soon as January 1940, and producing Five Kings and other favorite plays such as Peer Gynt, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and The Playboy of the Western World.
Orson had arrived in Hollywood with a beard he’d been cultivating for Falstaff and Five Kings, and now he continued to grow it for his role as the evil Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. The press seized on his beard, without always explaining the reasons behind it, and many columnists treated it as satirical fodder. F. Scott Fitzgerald was not alone in referring to Orson as “That Beard,” as he did in his short story “Pat Hobby and Orson Welles” in Esquire. (“What’s he done to draw one hundred and fifty grand a picture?” Pat Hobby complained.) Even the New York Times dubbed Welles “the bearded bogeyman of Hollywood.”
If he hadn’t intended the beard as a provocation, later he changed his tune. “You mainly kept the beard for its irritation value?” Peter Bogdanovich asked Welles.
“Let’s say,” Welles answered, “that I didn’t fancy the idea of collaborating with prejudice.”
As in New York, differences in cultural sophistication and political coloration helped define the factions squaring off for and against this newcomer to Hollywood. The relatively high-minded Los Angeles Times was officially friendly to Welles. The Hearst newspapers, the more flippant correspondents, and defenders of the film world’s status quo like the Hollywood Reporter were never less than wary of Orson, and often openly hostile. At the end of September, the Hollywood Reporter’s powerful publisher, W. R. Wilkerson, used his high-visibility column to blast George Schaefer for taking “too much of a gamble” on Welles “in these critical times.”
Orson wasn’t entirely innocent with regard to the widening schism between his defenders and his detractors. He and Diana Bourbon often crossed swords over the casting of guest stars—particularly leading ladies—on the radio show, and Orson’s private memos were full of unflattering opinions about prissy missies (in his view) such as Irene Dunne, whom Bourbon kept pushing for appearances on the Campbell Playhouse. Orson could be just as blunt in interviews, offering “candid, uninhibited opinions of everything,” in columnist Sheilah Graham’s words, after she spoke to “the bearded boy-wonder” for her syndicated column—and he cheerfully handicapped the leading ladies of Hollywood.
“There is no great actress of the screen,” Welles declared.
What about Bette Davis? Graham asked.
“She’s good,” Orson answered, “but not great in the sense that Helen Hayes is great. Garbo is the closest approach to a big personality here, but even she falls below the standard set by the men—with Spencer Tracy at the head of the procession.” Mickey Rooney (“the George M. Cohan of the future”) Orson ranked up there with Tracy, Chaplin, and Emil Jannings.42 But forget Katharine Hepburn, whom Welles had disliked since their appearance together in the radio adaptation of A Farewell to Arms: Hepburn is “an amateur who is talented, but even though she tries to be a professional for the next hundred years, she’ll still be an amateur. She embarrasses me.”
Such remarks, harsh toward individuals and sweeping in their preference for Broadway over Hollywood, did not endear Orson to many in the screen colony.
One night early in the fall, talk of “The Beard” and his contempt for certain leading ladies combined with rumors about the “all-male population of the house in Brentwood,” in the words of John Houseman, to spark a confrontation in which Welles was taunted as a “queer” by one of the screen community’s less desirable elements. According to Houseman, the incident occurred at the Brown Derby. Welles said that it was at Chasen’s, and the instigator was “Big Boy” Guinn Williams, a burly Western star who had been a rodeo performer before entering silent pictures. After slashing off Welles’s tie with a steak knife, Williams challenged Orson to a fight in the parking lot. “Good friends pulled us apart,” Welles remembered. “The whole thing was a formal affair, really, without much conviction on anybody’s part. Errol Flynn sicced him onto me.”
Flynn was “one of the leaders of the anti-Welles faction,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich. “Ward Bond was another.” Bond was a right-wing bully with a long memory; twenty years hence, he would get Welles blackballed from John Ford’s The Last Hurrah on political grounds.43 Flynn, on the other hand, was more rogue than ideologue, and in time Welles would easily win his friendship. After the tensions between them cleared, Welles went out often with Flynn, his wife Lili Damita, and her friend Dolores Del Rio. Ten years later, Flynn let Welles use his sailboat in The Lady from Shanghai, and late in Flynn’s life—in 1958—they appeared together in The Roots of Heaven, directed by John Huston.
The “barrage” of anti-Welles sentiment, according to columnist Graham, was “verbal and written.” Orson was well aware of all the jeering, she wrote, but it didn’t bother him much at the time. “I get a little sad sometimes when they print that I smashed a camera when I actually had posed for everything the cameramen wanted,” Welles told Graham. “But I really don’t mind.” (He would touch on the subject of friends versus stooges in Citizen Kane: “Maybe I wasn’t his [Kane’s] friend but if I wasn’t, he never had one,” says Jed Leland, played by Orson’s own best friend, Joseph Cotten, to the reporter searching for Rosebud. “Maybe I was what you nowadays call a stooge.”)
In his letters to Virginia, Orson showed genuine enthusiasm about RKO and Hollywood, though he recognized the divide between the many, many people he liked and admired, and the others. “The old-fashioned movie people who grew up with the industry and who know what makes a picture move on the screen are all very nice,” Orson wrote to his wife in Ireland. “There is nothing horrible about this town if you avoid the horrible people.”
RKO offered Orson a refuge as well as a workplace, with plenty of work always left to be done. At the end of August, RKO formally confirmed Heart of Darkness as the first Orson Welles production, and Orson started casting ahead of the final screenplay, as he had done in New York with his Mercury stage and radio shows. The script would be prodded and guided by the casting.
In late August, studio publicity revealed his first selection: Gus Schilling would play a German doctor in Heart of Darkness. Schilling’s name was almost completely unknown in the motion picture industry, except to frequenters of the downtown burlesque houses. Having proved himself to Welles in Five Kings, the rubber-faced comedian Schilling would now make his Hollywood debut in a dramatic role. “Orson Welles’s popularity in Hollywood is due for a decline,” warned columnist Jimmie Fidler, “when our local actors learn that members of his own Mercury Theatre troupe are slated for almost all the assignments in his first picture.”
Welles also thought of
his old soul mate the strapping Harlemite Jack Carter, the Macbeth of his Voodoo Macbeth and the Mephistopheles of his Faustus. He cast Carter as the Steersman, the native African (“as proud as a wild, great beast” in the words of Welles’s script) who meets his demise in the story while guiding Marlow up the river. Anytime a black man was cast in a billed role in a major studio production, it was newsworthy during this era, when prejudice ruled the screen trade; and in this case it was all the more so because Carter’s was another name new to Hollywood.
Setting past misunderstandings aside, Orson reached out to Chubby Sherman and Norman Lloyd, both of whom agreed to come to Hollywood and play featured parts in Heart of Darkness. Welles signed George Coulouris, Ray Collins, John Emery, Everett Sloane, Erskine Sanford, Edgar Barrier, Frank Readick, and Vladimir Sokoloff for other speaking roles. Orson’s staff of assistants—his yes-men, stooges, and slaves—had to juggle the different schedules of all the incoming performers, arranging their various appearances on The Campbell Playhouse in New York around the studio’s needs for tests, contracts, and fittings on the West Coast.
Welles devoted part of every day to researching, interviewing, and testing actors for the dozens of parts. Conrad’s story had one significant female character—Elsa in the novella, who joins Marlow’s river journey—and Orson intended to build up her role in his script. Orson wanted Elsa to be played by a foreign-born actress: someone with an exotic aura but without Hollywood baggage. (This gave trade columnists another reason to snipe.) At first, Orson gave the inside track to the accomplished German actress Dolly Haas, who had only recently emigrated to the United States. He made a stab at Ingrid Bergman, who was new to Hollywood, but producer David O. Selznick, who controlled her contract, wouldn’t budge. Finally, after watching Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, Edmond Gréville’s Mademoiselle Docteur, and Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, he decided on an actress who appeared in all those films: German-born Dita Parlo, who was currently residing in Paris. He sent Parlo a telegram making an offer, she tentatively accepted, and he penciled her in for Elsa.
On and off the lot, Orson respectfully sought the advice of established Hollywood directors. Almost uniformly, to his surprise, this was one segment of the industry that reacted to him with graciousness. If the veteran filmmakers resented the “boy wonder” at all—his youth, the overblown talk of his golden contract—none of them showed it. Rather, they gave him useful tips and confidences. “Logically, they should have been envious and bitchy,” he recalled. “They were wonderful.”
W. S. Van Dyke, who was best known for his Thin Man comedies but whose long career harked back to the silent era, told Orson, “Just keep [the camera] close, and keep it moving.”
“Did you follow [that advice]?” Peter Bogdanovich asked Welles.
“Not really. I stay away from closeups when I can, you know—and when my actors are good enough.”
King Vidor, whom Welles came to know through Dolores Del Rio, became a particular friend. Orson would attend the Hollywood premiere of Citizen Kane with Del Rio, Vidor, and John Barrymore, afterward attending a small dinner party at the Vidors’ home. Orson would write most of the script for The Magnificent Ambersons aboard Vidor’s yacht, sailing to Catalina Island. Vidor told him, “A good director is a fellow who doesn’t go on trying to get everything right, who knows when to walk away from something and when to stay with something.”
“I think that’s a wonderful definition and I never forgot it,” Welles recalled years later. “I leave some things rough, and I stay on other things because I think he’s absolutely right. If you paint a picture, you’re not going to spend the rest of your life on the lower left-hand corner. And there are so many directors of the [William] Wyler and [Fred] Zinnemann school, who paint the lower left-hand corner with so much intensity and good taste that they’re left with shlock.”
It was as though the old-time directors (“they weren’t all of them so old then, of course—but at that epoch they looked a bit old-time to me”) were rooting for the new kid on the block. “I took a lot of trouble getting to know them, and it was worth it—sort of rubbing movies into my pores,” Welles told Bogdanovich. Besides Van Dyke and Vidor, Welles’s other friendly mentors included Lewis Milestone, Victor Fleming, Frank Capra, and John Ford.
While they could have felt the most resentful, the RKO directors seemed the kindest of all. Orson could be amusing on the subject of how unedifying it was to actually observe some of them at work, as when he visited George Stevens, Ashton’s nephew, on the set of Vigil in the Night. When he arrived one morning, Stevens was in one of his notorious trances, completely motionless, his head in his hand, no one speaking, everyone tiptoeing around him, waiting for something to happen—what, Welles had no clue. Maybe Stevens had gone batty. Orson waited “fifteen minutes. Nothing. Stevens didn’t move. I waited half an hour, forty-five minutes; eventually I realized he was sleeping! Finally, after an hour I left the set. He was still asleep.”
When Stevens dined privately with Welles, however, the veteran director talked expansively about directing, and the two developed a rapport based on their shared love for Ashton. Orson also enjoyed long talks with former Broadway actor and director Garson Kanin, with whom he had many New York ties in common. Kanin, only a few years older than Welles, had just made the leap from scenarist to RKO director. Kanin was “as sweet as ever,” Orson wrote to his wife, and brought “a really fine enthusiasm and discrimination to his work. He was very helpful and generous, as indeed is nearly everybody else.”
The best way for Orson to rub movies into his pores was at the screenings he conducted constantly, day and night, at the studio. Sometimes, Orson watched pictures looking for possible actors (he spotted the capable Englishman Robert Coote in rushes for George Stevens’s Vigil in the Night, for example, and promptly engaged him for Heart of Darkness). Sometimes he watched pictures for specific technical reasons, with a department head or specialist sitting close to him and answering his questions about techniques unfolding on the screen. Sometimes, Orson watched pictures for African atmosphere, or possible stock shots.
To a degree, Orson wanted an ethnographically realistic Heart of Darkness, befitting his appreciation for the documentary style of filmmaking represented by Robert Flaherty (not to mention the South Seas films made by the cameraman on Too Much Johnson, Harry Dunham).
Frank Brady’s book offers the most comprehensive list of the films Welles watched. Orson sat through Chang from 1927, a silent documentary by the King Kong team of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack exploring the jungles of Siam. He also saw the 1929 silent Four Feathers, directed by Cooper, from which Orson thought he might use footage of the hippo stampede. He watched Belgian documentarist Armand Denis’s Kriss from 1932, shot in Bali, and Magie Africaine (a.k.a. Dark Rapture) from 1938. Orson took a look at Wings over Africa from 1934, an African travelogue using aerial photography by an American couple, Martin and Osa Johnson. He also screened W. S. Van Dyke’s Trader Horn (1931), F. W. Murnau’s Tabu (1931), Victor Fleming’s Red Dust (1932), and Zoltan Korda’s Sanders of the River (1935). When he asked to see Robert Wiene’s German expressionist masterpiece of 1919, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the Museum of Modern Art in New York sent its deluxe print to RKO.
Sometimes, Orson took a break and watched a picture just for the sheer delight he took in its craftsmanship. Over the weeks and months he watched many pictures directed by John Ford, even if they had little to do with Heart of Darkness or any other project Orson might be considering. He knew Ford’s greatness from boyhood. “The Iron Horse,” Welles told Bogdanovich, recalling Ford’s 1924 railroad epic; “I’ll never forget the effect that had on me as a child.” He ordered up screenings of Arrowsmith (1931), set partly in the Caribbean jungle; and The Lost Patrol (1934), about British solders stranded in the desert during World War I. He sat through The Informer (1935), Ford’s Oscar-winning drama about violence in sectarian Ireland in the early 1920s. “What a sense [Ford] always has for tex
ture,” Welles said, “for the physical existence of things.” But Orson also screened less relevant Ford pictures, such as the mistaken-identity comedy The Whole Town’s Talking (1935), which was light years from Heart of Darkness. “He’s such a fine comedy director,” Welles told Bogdanovich. “People tend to forget that.”
The single film he watched most often in the run-up to Citizen Kane was Ford’s landmark Western Stagecoach, which had launched John Wayne as a bankable star earlier in 1939. (It would eventually receive seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director.) He watched this film “as many as forty times,” Welles estimated. Perhaps the journey of stagecoach passengers through embattled Apache lands overlapped with his project encompassing a dangerous Congo River trip, but Welles valued it not for its script pointers but as a textbook of visual vernacular. “After dinner every night for about a month I’d run Stagecoach,” Welles recalled, “often with some different technician or department head from the studio, and ask questions, ‘How was this done?’ ‘Why was this done?’ It was like going to school.”
In 1967, when an interviewer for Playboy asked his opinion of the current crop of American directors, Welles scrounged for contemporary names and ended up genuflecting to Ford. “Stanley Kubrick and Richard Lester are the only ones that appeal to me—except for the old masters,” Welles said. “By which I mean John Ford, John Ford and John Ford. . . . With Ford at his best, you feel that the movie has lived and breathed in a real world—even though it may have been written by Mother Machree.” Ford was the director he tried hardest to rub into his pores.
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 69