While in New York, Welles also learned that Virginia had met with Arnold Weissberger to initiate divorce proceedings. Under prompting from her father in Chicago, who had never warmed to Welles and suspected his son-in-law of salting away money from his inheritance and Hollywood windfalls, Virginia sought steep terms Orson could not easily afford: several thousand dollars monthly in alimony and child support, or 50 percent of his annual income, whichever was greater. As a footnote, Virginia presented a $500 bill for personal items purchased at Orson’s insistence—such as the Parisian gowns—for which she had never been reimbursed.
Returning to Hollywood from New York, Orson had mixed emotions about the postponement of Heart of Darkness and the imminent end of his marriage to Virginia. The geographical and emotional distance he put between himself and his wife over the summer had become an unbridgeable gulf. Divorce would be a mercy for the couple. And while Heart of Darkness had temporarily fallen through, he thought he could launch the less demanding Smiler with the Knife expeditiously after the first of the year. Now he could even shave his beard, which had recently assumed “Assyrian proportions and type,” in the words of columnist Sidney Skolsky.
One of the first things Orson did on returning to Hollywood, late in 1939, was narrate a voice-over for RKO’s adaptation of an adventure classic, The Swiss Family Robinson. Orson did it as a return favor to a friend, scenarist Gene Towne, who had been helpful with advice on The Smiler with the Knife. Swiss Family Robinson was Towne’s first picture as a producer, and it was also Orson’s first true “appearance” in a Hollywood production. Despite his growing financial woes, Orson accepted only a nominal fee of $25, which he donated to charity.
Facing an intense month of work on the script for The Smiler over the holidays, he turned to Herman Mankiewicz. Once the king of Hollywood screenwriters, Mank was still out of work, “discredited at all the studios,” according to his sympathetic biographer Richard Meryman, and subsisting on his paychecks from the Mercury.
“For Herman, a self-destructive personality, who worried that he was a washed-up hack,” wrote Meryman, “the chance to deflate this boy wonder was irresistible.” Mank shifted his habitual animus onto Orson, determined to show him up at the movie script game, arguing over every word Orson had written. “He destroyed my confidence in the script,” Welles recalled, “sneering at everything I did, saying, ‘That will never work.’ ” But Orson enjoyed butting heads with superior intellects, and little by little he regained his equilibrium with Mank.
Meanwhile, Herbert Drake and the RKO publicity department were launching a rearguard action against the poisonous barbs flung at Welles, persuading Edwin Schallert to write in the Los Angeles Times that the script for The Smiler was nearly ready for filming to begin, and that the production was expected to go before the cameras by the end of January. “Working practically day and night,” Schallert reported, Welles may well be “the hardest worker in Hollywood.” “Practically day and night” was not strictly true—Orson was visible attending premieres and parties for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Of Mice and Men, and Gone With the Wind, among other occasions, often with the married actress Dolores Del Rio as his companion. But she always appeared to go home alone at the end of the evening, and Orson returned to Brentwood to work until dawn.
Compounding the pressures of time and money was a problem left over from the postponed Heart of Darkness: Orson had enticed more than a dozen Mercury players to Hollywood, welcoming them with an extravagant party, then stowing them in his mansion and various other places while helping them land spot acting jobs to keep them busy and solvent. In December, the radio series shifted to the West Coast for most future broadcasts; that eased Orson’s logistics and opened up more radio work.
But now that Heart of Darkness had been replaced by The Smiler with the Knife as his first project, Orson was confronted with a smaller budget and a smaller cast to fill. Some of the transplanted actors, such as Orson’s Harlem friend Jack Carter, would not be transitioning to The Smiler. And even the actors who were promised a part in Smiler now looked at weeks or months of waiting before their work (and paychecks) would begin. Hollywood actors routinely coped with such vicissitudes, but the Mercury players were new to film, and Orson felt responsible for them.
The week before Christmas, John Houseman drove from New York to California. He felt as irrelevant as ever in Hollywood—“I had little to say about Welles’s film activities,” he wrote, “yet I remained president of the Mercury and Orson’s partner”—but he joined the Mercury’s West Coast team for a celebratory year-end summit at Chasen’s, the chic Hollywood eatery. Besides Welles and Houseman, the attendees included Albert Schneider, Herbert Drake, Richard Wilson, William Alland, Richard Baer, and “our new California secretary (a dark girl with wonderfully long, narrow crimson nails),” in Houseman’s words.
After steaks and too many drinks, Orson got down to business discussing the emergency: RKO had sent word that actors’ salaries would not be paid until a final script, budget, and schedule had all been authorized. In the interim, Orson declared, it was the Mercury’s sacred duty to carry the actors out of reserve funds. When Schneider lamely informed him that there were no reserve funds, Welles exploded.
“He had absorbed more than his normal quantity of alcohol,” Houseman wrote in Run-Through. “His eyes were bloodshot, his face damp and white.”
Orson turned to Houseman, pointedly asking, “What would you do?”
“Tell them the truth for once,” the producer replied.
Orson took the bait angrily. “I don’t lie to actors,” he declared, according to Houseman. “I’ve never lied to an actor in my life! You’re the one who lies! That’s why they hate you! You’re a crook and they know it! Everybody knows it! Everybody!”
Houseman had reached his personal “Götterdämmerung,” as he put it. He stood up, collected his belongings, and started for the door. Welles picked up one of the “burning Sterno dish heaters” on the table and hurled it after him. “It missed me by a yard and landed at the foot of a drawn window curtain behind me. Another flaming object flew by me.”
Returning to his leased apartment, Houseman took to bed. A knock came on the door—it was “the girl with the red nails”—but he refused to answer. Later came Orson himself, ringing the doorbell, to no avail. At dawn, “a four page telegram” from Welles was delivered by hand. That afternoon Houseman got into his car and headed east, he said, listening on the car radio to “the last Campbell Playhouse I had written.”
Stopping in a small town in New Mexico, he composed two letters. “The first, formal and typewritten, was to Orson.” Houseman excerpted the formal letter to Orson in his book: “Nothing that has happened recently affects the very deep affection I have for you and the delight I have found in my association with such a talent as yours,” the letter began. “What happened the other night merely brought to a head a situation I have seen growing worse for some time—the situation of my false position with the Mercury. . . . It is true that in the past year my position with you and with the Mercury has become something between that of a hired, not too effective manager, a writer under contract and an aging, not so benevolent relative.
“Besides which, there has been something between us, lately, which instead of being intense and fruitful merely succeeds in embarrassing and paralyzing us both.”
But it wasn’t quite a high-principled resignation. While insisting that “the present situation is hopeless and must be changed at once for both our sakes,” Houseman signed the letter “Love,” and concluded with, “Let’s have dinner together” the next time Welles was in New York.
His second letter, “in longhand,” flew to composer Virgil Thomson in Paris. This too was excerpted in Houseman’s memoir. “I have decided to end my association with Orson,” Houseman told Thomson, putting a more conclusive spin on the news. Reviewing the history of the Mercury, Houseman wrote that it was a chronicle of “failures that were sometimes honorable, sometimes idio
tic and ignominious—but constant and uninterrupted.” Too often, according to the letter, “feelings of grandeur and what-is-expected-of-the-Mercury completely supplanted the simple desire to put on a good show. I allowed Orson (and the fault is mine as much as his, since by failing to control and influence him, I was betraying my most useful function in the Mercury) to use the theatre as an instrument of personal aggrandizement.”
Orson’s publicity-mongering was a thorn in his side, Houseman continued in his letter to Thomson, “snowballing to the point where Orson has become a public figure only less recently and massively projected into the news and the national consciousness than Franklin D. Roosevelt, N. Chamberlain and A. Hitler. This new fame has grown in inverse proportion to the success of our recent artistic endeavors. It is unrelated to our work. In fact, it is just about fatal to our work. It is an appetite that grows as it is fed: in a creative artist, it becomes a compensation and a substitute for creation. . . .
“I am fond of Orson still,” he finished, “and I retain much of my admiration for his talent: but our partnership is over for good and with it an exciting chapter of my life. It has been very wonderful and very painful and I am very glad that it is ended.”
The famous Mercury Theatre (and film) partnership had “ended.”
But not quite, not yet, and not in this fashion: once again, Houseman’s action-packed account, which burnished his own integrity and advanced his theme of Welles gone amok, looks different when measured against other versions of the events.
Orson told Barbara Leaming that he had realized, long before the Chasen’s showdown, that Houseman was miserable in his subordinate position. (“He was working for me,” Welles said. “That’s why he hated me so.”) Houseman was no longer as useful to the radio show either, and the top salary he was drawing was needed elsewhere.
Houseman himself had other irons in the fire. On Mercury time, he was preparing a stage play that Howard Koch and John Huston were writing about Woodrow Wilson’s presidency. Orson knew about the play, which was announced a few weeks later, in the New York Times on January 22. According to that story, Houseman “is not associated with Mr. Welles in the latter’s controversial film activities,” but the producer denied that there had been any “formal parting” with Orson, and said that the Wilson drama “may or may not be a Mercury Theatre offering” in the fall.
Though he mentioned Welles’s four-page telegram in Run-Through, Houseman did not quote its contents, nor did he give the date of his longhand letter to Virgil Thomson, which could only have been written weeks or months after his letter to Orson. In later court testimony involving Citizen Kane, Houseman gave a different account of “the night of the flaming Sternos”; he told the court under oath that the objects Orson hurled in his direction that night at Chasen’s were flung “not at me but around the room.” And Simon Callow, in his intriguing section on “the night of the flaming Sternos,” points out that Houseman’s original typed letter to Welles was “subtly different” from the version excerpted in the producer’s memoir, and that the letter to Virgil Thomson also was “rewritten for publication.” In his memoir, Houseman edited out several damning self-criticisms that appeared in his original letters—including this from his letter to Orson: “I have found myself accepting this new position of mine not always with good grace, and I have found myself far too frequently buttressing my position with a kind of cynical, destructive passivity.” And he omitted this particular sentence, which undercuts his supposedly concurrent letter to Virgil Thomson: “I do not consider this a divorce from the Mercury.” As Callow noted, Houseman’s memoir also misrepresented Welles’s progress on his film projects. “He was wrong about the amount of work Welles had done,” Callow wrote.
By the time of the final confrontation at Chasen’s, it seems, both men were seeking an excuse to sever ties. According to Callow, “Houseman had been looking for an occasion to precipitate their rift, and the meal at Chasen’s had served well for the purpose.” According to Welles, the impetus was his. “The whole purpose was to get Houseman to quit and go back to New York,” Welles insisted to Leaming. “It was a total piece of theater. I didn’t throw the Sterno within ten feet of him. He’d been sitting at that dinner table cutting me up for an hour, but I didn’t get mad. I thought, ‘I’ve just got to get him away.’ I couldn’t say, ‘You’re not working for me anymore’ after all our time together and all. So that’s why I turned over the table. It was cold-hearted. It wasn’t a big end of it [the relationship]; it just got him off salary for a while.”
Welles’s time and money pressures intensified as the holidays approached. December marked the fifth anniversary of his and Virginia’s formal marriage ceremony in 1935. In the week before Christmas—the week of “the night of the flaming Sternos”—Virginia flew to Chicago, spending time with her parents while waiting for a flight to Reno, Nevada, where she intended to live temporarily for six weeks, the prescribed state residency for a divorce decree. Chicago reporters recognized Virginia and extracted a terse interview from her before she left. “This is no new story,” she said. “We have been separated for a year.”
Arnold Weissberger, who understood Orson’s financial morass better than anyone else, urged his client to leave the Brentwood mansion for a more affordable house in the Hollywood Hills above Sunset Boulevard. Orson said he would think it over.
Herbert Drake redoubled his efforts to point out that Welles was working “practically all day and night” and to get good publicity to offset the items about Orson’s divorce that were sweeping the press. Drawing on Dr. Bernstein’s dubious version of Orson’s life story, Decla Dunning wrote the most extensive profile yet of Welles in the Los Angeles Times, telling readers that the controversial tyro was “distressed by stories of his whimsies, his temperament, his thunderous anger and sullen silences.”
In the face of his marital breakup, which she downplayed, Dunning emphasized what a loving father Orson was. “When it comes to holding the center of the stage, he bows to only one other individual, his 18-month-old daughter,” Dunning wrote. Her piece perpetuated the “carte blanche” canard, calling “the unprecedented elasticity of his Hollywood contract a subject of controversy.” But Orson was not anti-Hollywood, as the PR campaign insisted. “I’ve been a movie fan all my life,” Welles was quoted as saying, and it was true.
“He has stirred public imagination to the extent that people may like or dislike him, resent or admire him, but not ignore him,” Dunning concluded in her flattering profile, timed for release on the last weekend before Christmas. “He won’t be able to slip by under par. He has to be good. And he is quite sure, with his unfailing optimism, the unquenchable, yet inoffensive ego which have marked his past ventures, that he will be.”
On December 23, Orson was photographed at the annual Screen Actors Guild holiday party, slender and smiling, his beard trimmed but not yet shorn, sharing a table with Dolores Del Rio, Fay Wray, and Cary Grant. Del Rio was personally popular with Hollywood columnists, and it helped Orson now that their romance could be out in the open. If it was a romance: Del Rio still denied that it was, and after the parties she still went home to her husband.
Toward the end of the Screen Actors Guild party, Orson found himself in a corner standing next to sixty-four-year-old D. W. Griffith, the pioneer of the silent picture era. Griffith was all but washed up in Hollywood: he was then working as an adviser to Hal Roach, who was producing the prehistoric epic One Million B.C., but Griffith hadn’t directed a full feature since 1931.
Orson never wavered in his admiration for Griffith, whose faults—the old-fashioned David Belasco touches and Victorian melodramatics, even the race prejudice of The Birth of a Nation—Welles preferred to see as unfortunate by-products of their time. Asked by Cahiers du Cinéma in 1964 what directors he revered besides John Ford and Jean Renoir, Orson said that his answer was not going to be “very original,” and that his idols were always the “same ones.” “The one who pleases me most of all is Grif
fith,” Welles said. “I think he is the best director in the history of the cinema.”
Welles edged into a conversation with Griffith, trying “to express what the older man meant to him and the art of film,” as Frank Brady wrote. Uncharacteristically, Orson found himself hemming and hawing. Aware that Griffith might have read the nonsense published about the “boy wonder” having a “carte blanche” contract, he imagined the pioneer disapproving of this young whippersnapper. “We stared at each other across a hopeless abyss,” Welles recalled.46
Perhaps, too, Welles saw in Griffith a presentiment of his own future in Hollywood. “There was no place for Griffith” in the film industry by 1940, Welles said years later. “He was an exile in his own town, a prophet without honor, a craftsman without tools, an artist without work.
“No wonder he hated me.”
On Christmas Eve, The Campbell Playhouse broadcast its final episode of 1939 from the studios of KNX in Los Angeles. The production was “A Christmas Carol,” and Lionel Barrymore played Scrooge, just as Orson had promised when Barrymore was ill the year before. With Orson narrating, the cast included one newcomer—the young actress and Radio Guild activist Georgia Backus—along with longtime Mercury “henchmen” (Decla Dunning’s word) George Coulouris, Ray Collins, Everett Sloane, Erskine Sanford, and Frank Readick.
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 72