My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  Never was ruined greatness so visible. The other great auteurs maudits of this century, Abel Gance and D. W. Griffith, disappeared into silence and oblivion. Eisenstein, not without his troubles, simply died young. Not Orson. Every time he trundled insincerely through some commercial for cheap liquor (he, the great bon viveur! He, to whom ‘commercial’ was a dirty word when applied to film) or one of the various mediocre manifestations of God with which he dignified other men’s nonsense, he sent a pang through the world’s heart. Poor Orson, we’d think.

  Poor Orson. Pity, for the man who made Citizen Kane, at least three other masterpieces, and at least two lesser but exquisite short films? Pity, for the man who revolutionised radio, whose theatre productions have never been rivalled for audacity and innovation, whose acting performances in the few good films he made for other directors (The Third Man, Compulsion) will never be forgotten? Yes, pity for what might have been: the very thing that haunted Welles himself. ‘Considering what I thought of myself at fourteen, I’m a mess,’ he admitted. ‘Where did it all go wrong?’ is the unspoken question behind every utterance he ever made about himself, and it is inevitably the theme of Barbara Leaming’s book. ‘If only people knew the true story!’ is Orson’s constant lament, and this, up to a point, is it, the first biography to have been written with its subject’s active cooperation, laced, indeed, with many conversations with Welles and his various intimates.

  In fact there are few surprises. The stories have been often told, generally rather better than here, although there is a more extensive treatment of Welles’s political activities than I have ever read before. (At one point he was quite seriously proposed for the Secretary-Generalship of the about-to-be-born United Nations.) The book originated in a Playboy profile, and it feels like it. Simple reportage, as of Welles’s return to Hollywood to receive his Lifetime Achievement Award, is well done, but historical reconstruction is not Leaming’s strong suit. Nor is she a stylist. She has a flat-footed way with an anecdote that threatens to turn even Orson into a bore. She is unable to give any impression of what the stage productions were actually like, how filming was conducted, even what his own performances were like. She never assesses him as an actor at all, Worse, she is unable to give the flavour of the man, let alone any account of the contents of his mind.

  I suppose it is no accident that she is really viciously unkind to both John Houseman and Micheál mac Liammóir, who have left – Houseman in Runthrough and mac Liammóir in All for Hecuba and Put Money in thy Purse – glorious accounts of Welles beside which her Orson is a frequently trivial dullard. The truth, of course, is that really only Orson himself could have written the extraordinary book needed. He actually tells her the sort of book she should have written: an investigation à la Kane, probing him from every different angle, testing his account of himself against the others. And she should be in it, too, he says. Well, she is, but she doesn’t really engage; under his spell, no doubt, which is forgivable, but not very satisfactory.

  Her strongest suit, surprisingly, is in what she disparages in herself as ‘pop psychologising’. Early on she correctly identities what she calls the key to Orson’s personality: ‘The past is more immediate to him than the present or any intervening period.’ To person after person, he is a boy all his life. ‘A monstrous boy’ (Houseman). ‘The boy wonder’ (Virgil Thomson). ‘The most talented fourteen-year-old I have ever known’ (Robert Arden). This boyishness is the glory of so much of his work, and a large part of the delight of the man himself: the sheer joyful high spirits of it all, the fun and celebration of the medium.

  In another, darker sense, he remained a boy all his life, the son of the brilliant Beatrice and the drunken Dick Welles. ‘I always felt I was letting them down. That’s the stuff that turned the wheels.’ Children could be treated as adults ‘as long as they were amusing’. But when Beatrice died, he felt ‘shame’. And when Dick, drunk and desperate, died, alone because Orson had refused to see him until he sobered up, he felt terrible guilt: ‘I don’t want to forgive myself. That’s why I hate psychoanalysis. I think if you’re guilty of something you should live with it. Get rid of it – how can you get rid of a real guilt? I think people should live with it, face up to it.’ And this guilt somehow permeates his life. Miss Leaming is unable to refute Charles Higham’s thesis that Welles had a deep reluctance to complete anything. Time and again – on The Magnificent Ambersons, Macbeth, The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil – he walked away from the film at a crucial moment, flung himself into something else, whether pleasure or work. Many of his personal relationships were similarly suspended – he just walked away from them.

  The whole life as presented by Mrs Leaming is melancholy reading. To read of the studio’s destruction of The Magnificent Ambersons is actually painful. In the end, Welles emerges as a somehow fated figure, not sure of what hit him. In this, and so many other ways, he seems to resemble another O. W., sipping himself to an absinthe death, telling the stories he was never going to write. Bright Lucifer is the title of an early play of Welles’s. He certainly fell; but not before having soared higher and with more tangible results than any maker of our century. Requiescat in pacem.

  I listened to the siren voices telling me that I should commit myself to a full biography, with the result that here I am, still writing it, twenty years on, two large volumes published and a third to come. One of the people who urged me on most passionately, God rest his soul, was the éminence grise of Condé Nast, Leo Lerman, the very embodiment of the old Manhattan, elegant, funny, informed, naughty. I wrote his obituary for the Guardian in 1994.

  New Yorker Leo Lerman, who has died aged eighty, was an actor, a stage manager, a set designer, a biographer, a critic, and, through his work at Condé Nast, a legendary editor. He was also a man whose social network generated a salon that stretched across five decades.

  Born in Harlem, educated at the Feagin School of Dramatic Arts, his Thirties career in theatre was followed in 1942 by his first Vogue article, on five women of the Renaissance. By the end of the decade he was working for Saturday Review, Harper’s Bazaar, House and Garden and Mademoiselle, where he was a contributing editor for more than a quarter of a century. As a features editor at American Vogue in the Seventies he commissioned writers such as Iris Murdoch, Rebecca West and Milan Kundera. He reviewed dance, theatre, music and wrote biographies of Leonardo and Michelangelo and a prize-winning history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Ismail Merchant introduced us seven years ago at the Connaught Hotel. The meeting was informed by a hectic gaiety characteristic of both men and not exactly alien to me. The fourth person present, Gray Foy, silver-haired, poker-backed, and sceptical at so much sudden energy, provided such stillness as was on offer. The feeling of an exploding nursery wasn’t contradicted by the fact that the centre of all the uproar, Leo himself, was alarmingly frail and apparently ancient. Age was hardly to be gauged, since even then, on first glimpse, the physical circumstances of the chair-bound man – thick wisps of white hair around the chin, tufts of it on the back of the head, lightly mottled pink flesh, dainty hands, unreliable legs, heavy unyielding torso – had the air of wittily assumed disguise, an elaborate masquerade by a dazzling infant whose fearless young eyes stared at you exhilarated and challenging, through the hugely magnifying lenses of his spectacles. Regally seated in the middle of the room, he somehow had the air of a child in a high chair.

  What was I doing? he wanted to know, impatiently, as if we had been reunited after too long an absence, though this was our first encounter. A book, I said, about Charles Laughton, and he beamed like the Pope hearing a perfect confession. Books were always to be encouraged. What kind of book? I’ve tried, I said, to make it like the book that Parker Tyler wrote about Tchelitchew. ‘Tchelitchew!’ he cried, clapping his hands. ‘Tchelitchew! I never thought I’d live to hear his name again.’ And then we were off on a conversation that never stopped till the day that he died, though an ocean and the rest of our live
s made sure that we only ever really met half a dozen times.

  He was my idea of heaven: a conduit of the brilliant dead who as he spoke entered the room more really than any hologram, Toscanini and Balanchine and Gertrude Stein and, yes, Tschelitchew, as vivid as if he’d just come off the phone with them. He’d lived at the hub (in his case the hubbub) of the world of art since he first arrived on the scene, as a personable young actor. He had been at every premiere, every vernissage, every répétition générale, was apprised of every scandal and had launched a few himself, knew everyone and had subjected them all to his X-ray analysis, wickedly unfair and then suddenly tender. He had gloried in it all, the carnival of personality, the drama of talent.

  ‘Glorious!’ was his favourite word. I have faxes from him which simply say ‘Glorious, glorious, glorious. Love, Leo.’ Ten days ago, I was sifting through some papers and found a photocopy he’d sent me of a page of Vogue magazine (where he’d reigned for so long as a sort of journalistic sybil, having soon abandoned the stage proper for the theatre of society). It was an account of New York, 1935. He’d scrawled across it ‘See the lovely life I lived!’ He was living it still, up to the last moment. The past was no nostalgic refuge for him: it was present – but so was the world in which he lived, in which his interest was absolute.

  Frail though he was when I met him, he became eggshell delicate as the years went by. Not for one second did he let this interfere with the daily schedule he pursued around America – even, if necessary, to the unloved Los Angeles, always pronounced with a hard ‘g’ – and around the world until the brutal hassle of international travel became unendurable. At home, in New York, nothing would stop him. Across busy thoroughfares, up stairs and through rough throngs Leo and Gray would struggle towards the desired event, Leo dispensing a witty if barely audible commentary on the passing scene until finally, ensconced in his seat, aching, brittle limbs carefully arranged in front of him, he would turn his great child’s head to the stage like a fledgling at feeding time, ever-expectant. Through those monstrously magnified eyes he took it all in, missing nothing, no image, no phrase, no gesture. All became part of the living record of his times that constituted his inner life. There were the parties, too, attended by him, blessed by him or given by him. Home – opposite the Carnegie Hall, where else? – was the last of the great salons, a vast apartment rammed to the ceilings with bibelots, a temple of bric-à-brac, ‘all quite worthless,’ Leo would say, ‘but every one of them means something.’

  Books, records, paintings, sculptures, fans, mantillas, boots, and there, in the centre of it all, Leo, wearing one of those embroidered caps favoured by Victorian bibliophiles, adding a perfectly appropriate touch of Alice in Wonderland. And at the centre of Leo was Gray, their adoring relationship on the knife-edge of passionate incompatibility, filled with an appalled fascination with each other. Each radiated immense strict caring for the other: the love was tangible. You could cut it with a knife. Love was the heart of it all for Leo. Years ago, I introduced him to a new amour of mine. After a brisk interrogation along Lady Bracknell lines, he beamed approval, then, as we left, grew suddenly grave. ‘Be kind to each other,’ he said with great precision, and we did our best to obey. Instructions of this kind were always forthcoming from Leo, and when they were, you listened. It seemed that he had berated, advised and admonished half of the Western world.

  Leo was writing his memoirs at the end. He was a memoir himself, an antiquarian of our times, John Aubrey and Chips Channon, the Goncourt brothers and the Duc de Saint-Simon, rolled into one, made pink and snowy and put in an embroidered cap. He seized life greedily as it passed, hooting with delight when it pleased, utterly undaunted when it didn’t, passing light and witty judgements on love and art and the times with exuberant delicacy, gay as a cricket, irrepressibly naughty, unerringly right. New York is scarcely going to be New York without him.

  Faltering

  With Ballad in the can, I came back to England to direct my first musical, Carmen Jones. I wrote about it for the Daily Telegraph to coincide with the revival of 1994, which had an unusual tour: Plymouth and Tokyo.

  I was in the middle of rehearsing my production of Die Fledermaus in Glasgow when the producer Howard Panter called me and wondered whether I knew Carmen Jones. Well, of course I did – who hadn’t seen Otto Preminger’s movie, beaten out dat rhythm on a drum with Pearl Bailey and been to de café on de corner with Dorothy Dandridge, while Harry Belafonte told her about dis flower dat she threw his way? Panter wanted to know if I’d like to direct it: he was about to secure the rights from the Hammerstein estate. I gulped. The lyrics were undoubtedly brilliant, and the black setting a masterstroke, but there was something somehow ponderous about the film that made me wonder if it wasn’t a period piece which was a great idea for its time but rather reach-me-down forty years later.

  Then I read the script of the original 1943 Broad way production. I was struck all over again by the deftness and the rightness of Hammerstein’s relocation of Bizet’s opera to a black American Deep South setting; but I was also struck by a curious coincidence. He seemed to have done, triumphantly, what I was struggling to do with Die Fledermaus: in an attempt to cast off the middle-aged never-never-land air of most productions of that old chestnut, I had transposed it to a contemporary Glasgow setting. I hadn’t quite got it right, whereas Hammerstein had triumphantly hit the nail on the head, finding the perfect marriage of music and setting. What had inspired him to make his version of Carmen?

  Carmen Jones was, from the start, a labour of love. Writing a screenplay based on the life of the grandfather (Oscar I) who had lost a fortune trying to promote accessible and dramatically coherent productions of opera in an age of all-singing, non-acting stars, Oscar II became possessed of a missionary desire to bring opera to the people, in English and with credible characters in recognisable situations. The choice of Carmen can’t have been difficult. The most popular of all operas, crammed with hit numbers as well as having one of the clearest and best-told of stories, its atmosphere is exotic and irresistible. Whether he was influenced in setting it among black people by other current black versions of famous classics – Orson Welles’s 1936 voodoo Macbeth or the Swing Mikado of 1938, or indeed by the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess – is hard to say, but once hit upon, the idea of transferring the piece to the Deep South of America must have seemed inevitable: the Gypsies, among whom so much of the opera is set, have a perfect counterpart in black America. Foreign and yet indigenous, a culture within a culture, passionate, physical, colourful, musical, they were a perfect solution to the problem of making the people of the opera both American and exotic. The changed setting was only a starting point. It needed to be worked out in detail; Hammerstein’s ingenuity in doing so led him to some radical results.

  In transposing the four acts of the opera, Hammerstein presented a greater range of black experience than had ever been shown on the Broadway stage, let alone on film. Setting his first act in a parachute factory, with the workers and soldiers of an impoverished Southern black town, he moved the second act to the very different world of a louche and rather shady bar in the same town, a world of pimps and good-time girls, where the world heavyweight champion drops by to pick up a one-night stand, until his managers persuade him to think of his trainer’s instructions. For the third act (Bizet’s Gypsy encampment) Hammerstein takes us into rich middle-class black society, at the champ’s elegant party in his fabulous Chicago South Side mansion. The fourth act presents a typical urban sports crowd, screaming encouragement at their hero before he fights his latest engagement.

  It was Hammerstein’s theatrical instincts, rather than a commitment to the black cause, that had made him choose a black milieu for the piece (he announced, extravagantly, that he was thinking of devoting the rest of his working life to transposing operas, planning next to do La Bohème set in New York’s Greenwich Village). But he was a committed liberal, and was concerned both to display what he called ‘the huge wealth of
black talent in this country’, and to represent black life credibly. In the first act, for instance, he changes Bizet’s dreamy chorus of factory girls extolling cigarette smoke into a celebration of one of the workers who has become a pilot – ‘Flying Man’. The Broadway audience in 1943 would immediately have recognised the allusion to Roosevelt’s recent enactment – under threat of a mass march on Washington by black activists – of legislation permitting blacks to train as pilots at a school specially established for them at Tuskegee Black University. Equally, his reinvention of the toreador Escamillo as Husky Miller, the coming heavyweight champion of the world, was clearly and squarely based on Joe Louis, whose visits to black neighbourhoods with his wife, the nightclub entertainer Marva Trotter, were described as being like royal visits – a scene exactly paralleled in Hammerstein’s Act Two, set in Billy Pastor’s bar.

  The relocation of the opera seemed to stimulate his imagination at every turn. Part of the creative excitement of Carmen Jones derives from the need which drove Hammerstein when he wrote it. In 1942, when he set to work, he had endured ten years of flops, the great days of Desert Song and Showboat many years behind him. He withdrew to the countryside with the La Scala recording of the opera on twelve 78s, and, working to no commission and with no prospect of a production, rediscovered himself both as a musical-dramatist and as a lyric-writer. His work on Carmen Jones has a new directness and understanding of the idea towards which he had for years been striving: the idea of the organic show, where numbers don’t stop the show for a song but grow directly out of the action and advance it. Only weeks after he’d completed his work on Carmen, and before he even had a producer for it, Hammerstein was approached by the Theater Guild to work with Richard Rodgers on an adaptation of the current Broadway hit Green Grow the Lilacs. Out of this grew Oklahoma!, and out of Oklahoma! – it’s not too sweeping a statement to make – came the whole of the modern American musical theatre, the direct fruit of the lessons he learned in writing Carmen Jones.