Just before going on the air for the second show at 11 P.M., Orson showed Hayes an anonymous telegram sent to him in the interval by a New York listener. “IT’S A GOOD THING MOLNÁR IS DEAD,” the telegram read. “THIS SHOW WOULD HAVE KILLED HIM OFF.”44 Hayes was right after all, Orson told her with one of his rolling guffaws. “A quality which endeared Orson to all,” she recalled, “was his ability to laugh at his own mistakes.”
When Orson and his wife finally reunited in New York, Virginia confronted him with the rumors about Del Rio. Orson was his usual innocent and flabbergasted self. He indignantly insisted his relationship with Del Rio was platonic. His friendship with her had kept him sane in periods of unimaginable stress. But Virginia was unmoved. During the voyage, she announced, she had decided to delay moving to California while she pondered her future as Mrs. Orson Welles.
The argument only stiffened Orson’s attitude against Virginia, but still he walked away believing his marriage would survive. Roger Hill and his wife were fond of Virginia, and when they heard of the discord, they encouraged him to reconcile with her. “I urge you now to give Time, that great mellower, a chance, and don’t rush now into a final decree,” Skipper wrote to Welles. Dr. Maurice Bernstein, a veteran of two matrimonies and quick divorces, had less credibility on the subject but also preferred to see Orson’s marriage healed.
Virginia elected to stay in New York for several weeks. Orson believed he would see her whenever he was in the city for the radio series and gradually talk sense into her. But the wire service photographs of “Orson Welles’s wife” out on the town with friends like Franchot Tone and the writer Charles Lederer drifted back to Hollywood, and the press began to wonder in print about the state of their marriage. Still, as late as December 7, Orson was denying the gossip about an impending divorce. “There is no truth to it,” he told columnist Sidney Skolsky. “She will continue to be Mrs. Welles.” (“I only quote,” Skolsky added straight-facedly.)
About her own fidelity, Virginia was “untruthful,” according to Mercury actress Paula Laurence, who was her close friend. Orson was “relentlessly unfaithful” with other women, Laurence granted, but Virginia also privately admitted to “an affair or two of her own.” Welles’s script, written late in his life for the film about The Cradle Will Rock, suggests that he suspected as much.
It may have been Geraldine Fitzgerald, as much as Del Rio, who lit the fire of divorce under Virginia. Geraldine and Virginia were good friends, and all summer long in Ireland and then all during the voyage home, they talked about Orson, whom they both adored, sometimes in spite of everything—the wonderful, impossible Orson.45 The two women almost competed in their professions of love for him, topping each other with their respective anecdotes about his outrageous behavior. Orson was genuinely enamored of Fitzgerald, but she liked to exaggerate their intimacy. What if Fitzgerald told Virginia the same anecdote she later told her son, about nearly eloping with Orson one night? What if she exaggerated more, telling Virginia that she and Orson had had a torrid affair?
As it happens—and as Virginia knew—Geraldine was pregnant on the ship returning from Ireland, according to her son, Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Who was the father? During her lifetime, Fitzgerald played games in clarifying his identity—even when speaking to her son. Sometimes, she told him that his father was her husband, the English baronet Edward Lindsay-Hogg, and that her pregnancy was an “accident” that summer, spent in County Kildare. At other times, however, she hinted to him and many others that his father was Orson Welles.
“The story got started, maybe gossip at first, and juicy gossip it was, or because others thought it,” Lindsay-Hogg wrote. “She embraced it, but subtly, for she was clever. Her denials were contradicted on her part by glancing hints, innuendo, maybe giving some clues to some people in Hollywood, which would keep the story going, and hard no’s to others. It gave her cachet.”
The questions about his paternity haunt Lindsay-Hogg’s memoir, Luck and Circumstance. He grew up to become a television and film director, acclaimed for episodes of the dramatic series Brideshead Revisited and for crafting the Beatles’ final film, the documentary Let It Be. Lindsay-Hogg spent years wondering who his actual father was and trying to coax the elusive truth from his mother. After her death in 2005, he sought clues and opinions from people who had known her. After a long soul-searching quest, he ended up believing Welles was his father.
Since the publication of his book in 2011, this has become widely accepted folklore. The Wikipedia entry on Lindsay-Hogg, for example, states that Orson Welles was his “biological father.” Imdb.com describes Lindsay-Hogg as the “biological son” of Welles from Orson’s “brief affair” with Fitzgerald “during her marriage.” Welles’s paternity has been reported as an established certainty in both the New York Times and the Times of London, and their endorsement has emboldened many other accounts to follow suit.
Surely, Virginia must have heard Fitzgerald drop the same hints about their beloved Orson and about Michael, who was born just six months and two weeks after Fitzgerald’s return from Ireland, on May 5, 1940.
“What does Orson say?” Michael Lindsay-Hogg once asked his mother.
“He likes the idea that people think he has a son,” Fitzgerald replied. “And the whole intrigue of it, and so he’d probably give you his little smile and not say anything, or he’d say . . .” Lindsay-Hogg continued: “And here my mother put on an affronted bass male voice, as though from a melodrama, ‘How dare you suggest I’d ever betray my friend Eddy Lindsay-Hogg. Humph.’”
Perhaps understandably, given the emotional content of the issue, no one seems to have traced the incontrovertible chronology. Fitzgerald departed from New York for her summer stay in Ireland on May 17, 1939. She was gone from the United States for five months. During that time, Orson was in the Midwest, Hollywood, and New York, but he never traveled overseas. By the time she and Virginia landed in New York in late October, Fitzgerald was already pregnant.
The idea of Welles as Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s father is a biological impossibility.
Orson always acted in a fatherly way to Lindsay-Hogg whenever their paths crossed over the years. The younger man, early in his career, had some brief tutelage in acting under Welles, when the stage version of Chimes at Midnight was presented in Dublin and Belfast in 1960. But there is no record of Welles addressing, privately or publicly, the rumor that they were father and son—except once, in 1983, when Henry Jaglom asked about it during the lunches with Orson.
“It’s extremely unlikely [that I’m his father], which I’ve never told anyone, because I never slept with his mother,” Welles said, adding, “She was not my type.”
According to the transcript, Jaglom responded, “It’s true, you like the dark, Mediterranean types. People say, ‘I didn’t know that he was such an extraordinary Don Juan.’ ”
“I used to love everybody thinking I was having sex with everyone,” Welles rejoined. “But in this case it would have had to be an immaculate conception. . . .”
“Maybe you just forgot,” Jaglom offered amusingly.
“There’s just a chance that he is [my son],” agreed Welles, willing to magic away the impossibility. “He believes it. I have no idea. He’s a talented fellow. He acted in a play that I did in Dublin [Chimes at Midnight] when he was a young boy. I also saw a television movie he made. Awfully well done. He’s a very good director. And he smokes cigars well.”
In public, Orson made light of personal problems, especially romantic entanglements. But November was another month when the problems came at him from all sides.
As Orson’s marriage unraveled, Dr. Maurice Bernstein started inundating him with letters and phone calls, pleading for help with his own career, insisting he was “very unhappy and losing weight and strength from loss of sleep and worry.” His Chicago medical practice was stagnating. “I have no important hospital connections and have no teaching position,” Bernstein wrote.
First Dr. Bernstein asked O
rson to use his influence with George Schaefer to arrange a position for him as RKO’s studio physician. When Orson did as little as possible to advance this unlikelihood, Bernstein took the initiative himself, announcing that he would fly to San Francisco to take the oral medical exam for California certification, preparatory to moving his practice and his home to Beverly Hills.
There was one hitch in the doctor’s plans: his bank account was so low that he could not afford the air ticket to San Francisco. But if Orson would advance the cost of the ticket and provide Bernstein with financial assistance for “one year” in order for him and his wife to restart their lives in California, Bernstein wrote, “I will pay it back as soon as I am established.”
“People with arthritis and other bone and joint conditions go to California on account of the climate,” Bernstein explained. “If I had the proper backing I would go there without hesitation. But I must make a real showing in California. I cannot come there looking down in the heels, as far as living and office is concerned. . . .
“Don’t think that I want to go to California because of your being there, though that is no draw back [sic]. We tried to be out of your way when we visited you and I don’t expect to hang on you now. I never stood in your way and never imposed on you and will not start now. But I know that you are in a position to help.”
The many letters Bernstein dashed off to his ward were long and “effusive” in tone, he wrote, because he was practicing his spelling and vocabulary in case he had to take any kind of written exam for his California medical license. His wife, the former Chicago Tribune music critic, edited his letters as she typed them. “P.S.,” Bernstein scribbled on one, “You have helped many stranded actors who meant nothing to you. I hope that I mean more than they did to you.”
The doctor faithfully listened to all of Orson’s Campbell Playhouse broadcasts, as he often reminded Welles, enjoying the little in-jokes inserted just for him (Orson sometimes worked in the name of the doctor’s beloved pet dog). He relished his occasional opportunities for time together during Orson’s stopovers in Chicago—and was crushed if Welles passed through town without contacting him. “Need I tell you how disappointed I was when I got home and found that you flew past our house, and I was not there to wave a fond greeting,” Bernstein wrote in one letter. “I sat for hours at a time in the hope you would call.”
Welles still felt grateful to Bernstein, and fond of him, though he did sometimes elude him during the rush through Chicago, and he evaded Bernstein’s phone calls whenever he could. But Orson surrendered to this midlife cri de coeur, bankrolling Bernstein’s trip to San Francisco, and from San Francisco to Los Angeles for a short booking at the Chateau Marmont. Perhaps Orson was faintly amused when the doctor, a poor writer, announced that he was crafting a play that might also have possibilities for the big screen. “It is what they call a natural,” Bernstein told a third party, “but after all who am I to judge.”
By mid-November, though, Orson was pleased to put Dr. Bernstein on a plane home. He could ill afford to spend time or money on his guardian: although Orson hopped planes, frequented clubs, and lived in a mansion, his finances by now were a jumbled mess. Every dollar of salary and expense RKO paid him and his staff went to his film work, charged to the budget of Heart of Darkness.
Meanwhile, the Mercury maintained separate offices at CBS Columbia Square in Los Angeles for its other operations: radio, recordings, books, future plays. The West Coast office liaised with the marginalized New York office (now down to Augusta Weissberger) in apportioning the non-RKO Mercury income, as well as channeling prospective radio, stage, and screen projects. The Columbia Square staff was paid separately, often by Orson himself, out of his and the Mercury’s earnings from RKO. By the end of November, the situation was complicated by the small army of Mercury players who were waiting around for the filming to begin and for their own RKO paychecks to kick in. All the while Orson flew back and forth between New York and Los Angeles, with the travel costs mounting and being deducted from Campbell Playhouse advances. And throughout this time he was also making substantial payments on the Mercury’s debt and loans.
Richard Baer, in charge of the West Coast ledger, saw disaster coming. Welles paid for his day-to-day existence “solely on money earned from radio,” Baer warned the attorney Arnold Weissberger in late November, and “a good deal of that is going to pay both his back debts and Mercury back debts.” Orson’s weekly non-RKO expenses amounted to $800, “exclusive of rent,” Weissberger estimated. It had become Baer’s “full-time job,” Baer complained, to find that money somewhere and pay the bills.
Yet Orson refused to cut back on costs, demanding, for example, that his household staff be compensated at the going rate, as a matter of honor and reputation, and insisting on his own right “to live in a better style than he did previously,” reported Baer. The lavish lifestyle was vital to his image of success, Welles said, and to launching his career in Hollywood.
To make matters worse, Orson gave money away whenever he felt the urge. Besides the handouts to Dr. Bernstein, he lent significant sums during his first months in Hollywood to Burgess Meredith, Charles MacArthur, and other friends. When Harper and Brothers republished Everybody’s Shakespeare as The Mercury Shakespeare in late 1939, he signed over all future royalties to Roger Hill, as repayment for past assistance and loans and as a permanent token of their friendship. (A remarkable ninety thousand copies had been sold by this time.)
Weissberger sympathized with Baer, while urging him to stay strong. “The essential problem is Orson’s psychology in spending,” the attorney wrote. “He has never consulted his exchequer to see whether he could afford an expenditure. The expenses are incurred first, and then we have to see that payment is made in the best possible way. All along the chief difficulty has been that Orson’s expenditures have anticipated his income so that he has always been in the red.”
The only way Orson saw of alleviating the financial crunch was to create an additional revenue stream, separate and independent from both RKO and The Campbell Playhouse—with the inevitable risk of further taxing his energy and subdividing his creativity.
In December, RKO delivered the worst financial blow to Orson, when the studio departments reported their official cost projection for producing Heart of Darkness: an estimated $1 million. Orson’s initial contract with the studio had called for him to direct two films, each budgeted at half that outlay: $500,000. Studio president George Schaefer had kept an open mind as Orson hatched his ambitious plans for Heart of Darkness. But $1 million for one picture was a Rubicon that the studio rarely crossed, and it was an even more alarming figure for a serious, artistic film by a first-time director—given the loss of the European market.
Orson had long since abandoned his hopes of shooting Heart of Darkness in a real jungle. “I lost my battle to go to the swamps and do it in a real place,” Welles said later. “That was at the height of the period when nobody left the studio. The studio had to have control—as it was called—the famous studio control. . . . Well, I was more a victim than an authoritative pro like [Howard] Hawks would have been, because I was the stage actor and director who didn’t know what he was doing.”
Schaefer said that RKO might be able to float the film’s budget if Welles could find a way to shave $50,000 to $100,000 off the $1 million projection. Orson proposed using special effects rather than constructed sets for certain scenes, but that would require him to shoot the mattes and miniatures first, postponing the work with the actors for months while the special effects footage was prepared and photographed.
In early December, Orson met with Schaefer in New York to work things out. Orson suggested moving The Smiler with the Knife, which could be budgeted at less than $500,000, ahead of Heart of Darkness. As a cost-saving (and face-saving) gesture, Welles offered to direct and act in The Smiler without a salary, taking only his contractual 20 percent share of profits.
A grateful Schaefer tore up Welles’s two-picture
contract and rewrote it for three pictures, so that Orson would have two paying jobs on the back end of the deal. Welles could still direct Heart of Darkness down the road, along with a third picture for RKO, the subject of which would be determined later. Only later did Orson realize that his 20 percent share of profits would not be paid until after the studio had earned back the budgets of both The Smiler with the Knife and Heart of Darkness, which would be jointly accounted. As usual, however, Welles did not dwell on his money.
RKO announced the postponement of Heart of Darkness. “I did a very elaborate preparation” for the Joseph Conrad film, Welles told Peter Bogdanovich wistfully, “such as I’ve never done again—never could. I shot my bolt on preproduction on that picture. We designed every camera setup and everything else—did enormous research in aboriginal, Stone Age cultures in order to reproduce what the story called for. I’m sorry not to have got the chance to do it.”
Welles never wasted something he could reuse, however, and Peter Conrad is not the only authority to have noticed him “by stealth, distributing [parts of Heart of Darkness] through other films—Citizen Kane, The Lady from Shanghai, The Third Man,” continuing until forty years later, when he smuggled references to it into his script for The Big Brass Ring.
Although Orson had made his script and production budget deadlines on time—and the film’s downfall was, at least in part, due to political circumstances beyond anyone’s control—the postponement, combined with the announcement that Orson Welles had been re-signed to direct three RKO pictures, escalated the mockery from his ill-wishers in the business and the trade press. The Hollywood Reporter predicted that the deal would fall through without Welles’s “ever doing a picture.” The Smiler with the Knife was jokingly referred to as “Mr. Welles’s latest forthcoming picture.” Columnist Jimmie Fidler cracked: “Ha! They’re saying Orson Welles has increased his production schedule. Instead of not making three pics for RKO, he’ll not make five!” Spotting Orson at an event, Ed Sullivan described him as “chic in a silver fox beard trimmed with old RKO scripts.” Hedda Hopper weighed in: “Looks like the only hair-raising pictures Orson Welles made out here are the stills showing him wearing a beard.”
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 71