My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  The next day, Sunday, Vanessa tried on her costumes, and her creative process began, standing in front of the mirror, tugging at the clothes, violently rejecting some, inhabiting others as if she’d worn them all her life, snatching up hats, bits of cloth, bags, staring at her own image with the fierce eyes of an actor deciding whether she can believe in the dual image of herself and her character. We went back to the set to discuss hair. Vanessa had brought with her two wigs, made at her own considerable expense, and she and the film’s hairdresser started to shape one of them, hacking away at it, Vanessa urging him on. Again the sharp critical look in the mirror. She turned to Walter and to me and said: ‘Could you leave the caravan for a moment?’ When we went back she sat there, her shorn tresses on the floor, triumphantly gazing at her image, cropped, mannish, powerful, her blue eyes and blonde hair giving her the air of a Norse warrior. She stepped out of the caravan, into the sun, and stood there, laughing – roaring with the sheer joy of having refashioned herself into Carson McCullers’s Miss Amelia. Not, to be sure, the physical description of her from the book, but the very soul of her. She became the soul of Willieville, too, building her own garden, befriending the mule, arranging her kitchen – and the soul of the film, permeating it with her poetic genius.

  It took us eight weeks to film; it took another eight weeks to edit; sound editing and mixing took another five. The whole feeling and texture of the film depended on an actress’s ability to create a mythic figure at the centre of it. It owes everything to the courage and imagination and love of mankind of the exceptional creature that is Vanessa.

  The foregoing, though all true, is highly selective. In many ways, making the film was absolute hell. One day, when I was editing it (which was the worst hell of all), Jim Ivory said I must write a novel about it. I fully intend to.

  The influence of Charles Laughton’s only film on The Ballad of the Sad Café is beyond hommage: it is, I’m afraid, sheer imitation. I console myself with Picasso’s profound epigram: ‘To imitate others is necessary, to imitate oneself, pathetic.’ Before directing Ballad, I had started work on my next book, which was to be about Orson Welles’s theatre, stories of which – especially the stirring early days at the Mercury – had inspired me as a drama student. That’s the life for me, I had thought, working twenty hours a day, under the charismatic leadership of a young genius – stretching oneself and the theatre to the very limits, defying convention, electrifying the audience, changing lives.

  Citizen Kane was Orson Welles’s greatest triumph, of course, but in some ways it was his greatest scourge, almost obliterating his other, innumerable and diverse, achievements. Next in order of his achievements in the public view were the War of the Worlds broadcast (whose notoriety was a happy accident), The Third Man (which, of course, he didn’t direct and whose huge success at the expense of his own films profoundly irked him) and the Paul Masson advertisements, in which the great bon viveur, almost a parody of himself, endorsed a mediocre vin ordinaire in a thunderous purr which was widely and mockingly imitated. But before Kane and these other things came an extraordinary body of work almost unknown to the general public.

  Above all, the hidden oeuvre is the theatre work. It was the theatre that was Welles’s all-consuming passion from his earliest years, fed by a Shakespeare-worshipping mother, and nurtured by the childhood gift of a toy theatre. He had the extraordinary good fortune to go to a school whose educational philosophy was that learning was best done by doing. The young Welles was accordingly let loose on their brilliantly equipped theatre and lighting board, with an army of schoolboy-slaves at his disposal to build and paint sets and then to act as supernumeraries in his productions, in which, needless to say, he played all the leading roles – including, when he was not quite fifteen, Richard III in his own adaptation of the Shakespeare History Cycle which he titled Winter of Discontent. He had intended to play Sir John Falstaff as well, but for once the Todd School put its foot down when faced with a probable seven-hour running time. Welles reluctantly confined himself to a ninety-minute canter through the career of the deformed Plantagenet.

  He left school at fifteen, taking a year off before a putative application to university; he spent the year in Ireland under the guise of a painting holiday but in fact was simply determined to act, even offering to learn Gaelic on the off-chance that he might get a job in the Irish-language theatre in the West. Instead, he ended up in Dublin where he blarneyed his way into the Gate Theatre, run by the great team of Micheál mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards, and here, at the age of sixteen, he learned not only how to hold his own in a company of experienced and temperamental actors many years his senior, but also something of the very latest developments in lighting and staging, for the Gate was a daringly avant-garde theatre with a radically different policy to that of the Abbey, still then under the control of Yeats and Lady Gregory. When, after his sensational debut as Duke Karl in Jew Süss, the parts began to get smaller, he returned to Chicago, where he wrote two plays, one a fevered, semi-autobiographical piece, Bright Lucifer, the other a worthy account of the anti-slaver, John Brown. Time hanging on his hands, he also produced, under the aegis of his ex-headmaster and warmest admirer, Roger Hill, an edition of three of Shakespeare’s plays which they called Everybody’s Shakespeare, furnished by the seventeen-year-old Welles with staging suggestions and a running commentary in dazzlingly cartoonic visual form; these highly original teaching tools were hugely successful and were still in use in the mid-Sixties.

  Welles’s career as an actor took off when at the age of seventeen he joined Katharine Cornell’s immensely distinguished company, playing Mercutio to her Juliet. The performance was not judged a success (nor was the production) and when he came to New York in a revised version, it was in the role of Tybalt, for which he received moderate acclaim. But his performance was seen by the thirty-year-old director, writer, producer and ex-corn merchant John Houseman, who knew the moment he caught sight of Welles that he had encountered his destiny. They began to work together, and as soon as Houseman was put in charge of the Negro Theatre Project, an offshoot of the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project, in 1936, he invited Welles, now twenty, to stage Macbeth for him in Harlem. Welles changed the play’s setting to Haiti in the reign of Jean-Christophe, creating a kind of barbaric cabaret which was an absolute sensation. Shortly after, he and Houseman together formed another branch of the Federal Theatre which they whimsically named Project 491; for it they staged Doctor Faustus, one of Welles’s most technically dazzling shows, the zany Horse Eats Hat (from An Italian Straw Hat) and The Cradle Will Rock, Marc Blitzstein’s radical pro-union agit-prop musical. This proved too controversial for a government-sponsored project, and Welles and Houseman founded their own Theatre, the Mercury, which they inaugurated with a Fascist interpretation of Julius Caesar, whose fame spread across the Western world. This was followed by The Shoemakers’ Holiday (riotous) and Heartbreak House (respectful).

  On a shoestring budget, the Mercury was staking a claim to be the American National Theatre. Young actors were desperate to be part of it, and Welles, both as actor, but more particularly as director, was universally acknowledged as the White Hope of the American stage. He was now twenty-three. The second and last season of the Mercury however was something of a disappointment: Too Much Johnson never transferred to New York after a hilariously chaotic out-of-town try-out; Danton’s Death was beleaguered by technical catastrophe. Meanwhile the Mercury Theatre of the Air had begun its remarkable and innovatory seasons of classical adaptations; Welles quickly proved himself a master here, too. The broadcast of The War of the Worlds precipitated a panic which hit the world’s headlines; Hitler made reference to it in a speech to the Reichstag. Welles’s fame was now dangerously independent of his achievements, a self-generating phenomenon. While the brouhaha over the broadcast continued, the Mercury Theatre was quietly wound down, surviving only as a name for Welles’s producing company, to the eternal regret and occasional bitterness of a genera
tion of actors who had been inspired by Welles to believe in the possibility of a kind of theatre which was at once classic and radical, and a genuine alternative to the poetic social realism practised by the Group Theatre.

  The Mercury had one last gasp: Five Kings, Welles’s adaptation of the Shakespeare History Cycle, a second crack of the whip at the grand scheme that dwindled into Winter of Discontent at the Todd School. This was planned to be on two evenings, the first centring on Falstaff, the second on Richard III, both of whom, it is perhaps unnecessary to report, were to be played by Welles. In the event, only the first, Falstaff, half was produced, and then in nightmarish circumstances of primitive technology, manic rewriting and exhausted performers. But the play was very dear to Welles, and he not only had the set put into store for many years in the belief that he would revive the show, he also retained his Falstaff beard when he went to Hollywood, which he did in 1940; he was known, for his first few months there as ‘the Beard’. Ironically, Hollywood had only seemed to really wake up to his potential when his fortunes were at their nadir. After the demise of Five Kings, he had quixotically embarked on a tour of the Orpheum Circuit’s music halls with a cut-down version of William Archer’s hoary melodrama The Green Goddess; the only noteworthy aspect of this bizarre venture was the use in it of film (something he had already attempted in Too Much Johnson) but the few people who paid to see him were profoundly baffled by what they saw, and unable to believe that they were witnessing the work of a man who had only eighteen months before been acclaimed as perhaps the most exciting talent ever to be produced by the American theatre.

  Once he arrived in Hollywood on the contract of his – or anyone’s – dreams, he discovered film and the potential of RKO Studios’ craftsmen, and from then on the theatre was always essentially second fiddle to his cinematic aspirations. However, the theatre was deeply ingrained in his heart, and for at least another twenty years, he continued to return to his first love, with varying degrees of success, but always with imagination and originality. In 1942, for example, while desperately waiting for the release of Citizen Kane, he produced on Broadway a dramatisation of Richard Wright’s uncompromising novel Native Son; his use of sound and light, the claustrophobic atmosphere he evoked and the overwhelming performance that he elicited from Canada Lee in the central role, allied to his deeply felt radicalism in matters of race, created an overpowering impression of urban angst. Four years later, at the polar opposite of the theatrical spectrum, Around the World, his hommage to the spirit of the nineteenth-century spectacular theatre, with a Cole Porter score, was a piece of sheer theatrical ebullience, panned by the critics (‘Wellesafloppin’!’) but today still admired by those who saw it for its dazzling effects and sheer élan. The next year, he staged Macbeth again, this time in a severely Scottish and pagan setting, in Salt Lake City, prior to filming it in a version which suggests that Welles’s visual conception was curiously old-fashioned, with something of the feel of the Beerbohm Tree production at Her Majesty’s Theatre some fifty years earlier.

  Four years later again, in 1951, he came to London to act in and direct Othello, under Laurence Olivier’s management; he had just finished shooting his magnificent flamboyant film of the same play. The stage version, by contrast, was sober in the extreme, with his own somewhat somnolent performance at the centre; Citizen Coon, Kenneth Tynan called it. By contrast with the reckless freedom of his early stage productions, and indeed with the radical recasting of the texts for his cinematic versions, Welles seemed increasingly to see the theatre as a rather serious place, at least where Shakespeare was concerned. His next theatrical outing, however, was a piece of sophisticated boulevard, a double bill titled The Blessed and the Damned, premiered at the Edouard VII in Paris, consisting of Time Runs, a version of the Faust story with Eartha Kitt as a particularly seductive Helen of Troy, and a rather dubious satire on Hollywood, The Unthinking Lobster. He then took Time Runs on tour in Germany with a second half consisting of a thirty-minute version of The Importance of Being Earnest (with himself as Algernon and Micheál mac Liammoír as Jack), and various Shakespearean scenes. The tour was bedevilled by Welles’s frank dislike of his German hosts and his authorship of an number of hostile newspaper articles on the post-war persistence of Nazi sympathy.

  Back in London, where he resided for some years in the Fifties and Sixties, he created his version of Melville’s masterpiece, Moby Dick, at the intimate Duke of York’s Theatre, in 1955. It was a triumph, critically, and his innovations of lighting, of musical integration, and of the Pirandellian framework (Moby Dick is being rehearsed by a group of actors), were greatly admired by his contemporaries. However, it ran for no more than three weeks at a substantial loss. Welles had lost some of his pull at the box office. The following year came his disastrous experience with King Lear at the City Center in New York. His spraining not one but two ankles certainly looked like carelessness and resulted in his playing the role in a wheelchair; but this was the only innovation in the production of the slightest interest. There was widespread dismay at what was perceived to be the decline of a once-great talent. Lear had been planned originally as part of a season to include Volpone with Jackie Gleason as Mosca; the chimera of an American National Theatre led by Welles once again – for ever this time – disappeared.

  Late in 1959, Welles, all of whose waking and most of whose dreaming moments were spent engendering plans for films or plays, returned to his earlier obsession, Five Kings, and the role of Falstaff which meant so much to him. He also returned to his old partnership with Hilton Edwards from whom, in 1931, he had learned so much of his stagecraft. Together they put together the text which he now called Chimes at Midnight, a title reflecting his increasing melancholy about human affairs. Always precocious, he had settled, at the age of forty-five, into a sort of autumnal mood; his belief that the rejection of Falstaff signalled the death of Merrie England lent his interpretation a profoundly elegiac dimension. His physical bulk had now passed the point of simple fatness and had begun to become something of a phenomenon; this was, of course, no drawback in playing the part of Sir John Falstaff, which he did with some distinction, though the production itself, staged by Hilton Edwards on an impossibly overstrained schedule, was something of a flop d’éstime both in Belfast and Dublin where the reviews were respectful but failed to sell tickets. Welles’s work on the part and the text, however, bore glorious fruit in the film of the same name which, three years later, he started to make, taking with him from the original production only Keith Baxter, his dazzling Hal.

  There was to be one last theatrical venture, the same year as the stage version of Chimes at Midnight, 1960. Oscar Lewenstein invited Welles to direct Laurence Olivier in the English-language premiere of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros at the Royal Court. As was his wont, he designed the play and created both the lighting and the sound plot, and as a physical achievement, the show was something of a triumph. His work with the actors was less happy, however, culminating in Olivier’s exclusion of him from the final rehearsals. The first night was given an added surreal dimension – as if that were necessary – by the spectacle of Welles, on a primitive walkie-talkie, padding around the tiny theatre in Sloane Square, adjusting the sound levels in that uniquely audible voice. It is a curious end to a career in the theatre which had provided some of the most compelling productions of the century, and offered the promise of something quite exceptional which never quite materialised. It is a history, like much else about Welles, awe-inspiring, baffling and hilarious by turns.

  After my near débâcle with the Laughton biography, I went about my work with due diligence. I had been preparing for months, made all the contacts I needed, and secured appointments with all the relevant archives, including the great Lilly Library at Bloomington, Indiana. During the time of Shirley Valentine on Broadway, I went round all Welles’s old theatrical associates – actors, designers, stage managers, secretaries, publicists – asking about their time with him in great detail. And a number of th
em said to me, ‘Why just write about Orson’s theatre? You’re doing the work for a full biography. Write it – and we might recognise Orson from its pages. Because the Orson that people have written so far bears no resemblance to the man we knew.’

  The ‘authorised’ biography by Barbara Leaming had appeared, with wonderful timing for her, four years earlier, just before Welles’s death. Although I had no intention of writing a book about him at the time, I happened to review the book for the Sunday Times, in 1985. It is the first of many many hundreds of thousands of words I have written on the subject.

  When Orson Welles died, it was as if he had been relieved of some terrible burden, as if he could rest at last. Like a Flying Dutchman or a Wandering Jew, he had seemed condemned to roam the world expiating a nameless curse. From time to time he would appear on the world’s stage, a living ruin, his preposterous girth somehow the embodiment of all the unrealised projects, genius turned into lard. Ancient Mariner-like, he seemed, with his wonderfully humorously haunted eyes, to be catching our gaze and saying, ‘Look what happened to me,’ as if the wind had suddenly changed and he’d stuck like that.