In contrast to Hollywood’s gangster movies, the killings among real gangsters often don’t get solved. Nobody ever discovered who fired nine shots through Bugsy Siegel’s window, just as nobody ever discovered who attached the explosives to the accelerator of Willie Bioff’s truck. Nobody ever discovered, for that matter, who eventually broke into Gus Greenbaum’s house and cut his throat with a butcher knife. But Meyer Lansky, who never learned that crime does not pay, had amassed a fortune estimated at $300 million when he finally died of cancer in 1983 in the fullness of his eighty-second year.
Marriage to the incomparable Rita Hayworth apparently palled on Orson Welles. “Mr. Welles showed no interest in establishing a home,” the actress was to testify at the divorce hearing in 1947, just four years after the wedding. “Mr. Welles told me he never should have married in the first place, as it interfered with his freedom in his way of life.” Her restless husband might well have corroborated that view. “Women are stupid,” he once told a French interviewer. “I’ve known some who are less stupid than others, but they’re all stupid.” Though Welles’s “freedom in his way of life” meant a good deal of roistering, it also involved a good deal of hard work. After his debacle in Brazil, he struggled with several ambitious projects—including both War and Peace and Crime and Punishment—then undertook to show a suspicious Hollywood that he could make a perfectly orthodox film, on time and on budget. Welles directed, starred in, and partly wrote The Stranger (1946) for Sam Spiegel (during Spiegel’s temporary phase of calling himself S. P. Eagle). Though it was hardly a masterpiece, it was taut and dramatic, a very creditable piece of work.
One of the most interesting (and generally unrecognized) aspects of The Stranger was that it was the first Hollywood film to deal explicitly with the Nazi Holocaust, not as mere mistreatment but as mass slaughter. Welles’s film argued a somewhat implausible thesis, that a major SS official named Franz Kindler could disguise himself as a history teacher in a small Connecticut village, but in narrating the authorities’ efforts to trap Kindler, Welles included some documentary footage considerably stronger than anything that Hollywood’s professional liberals had yet brought to the screen. Here is what happened in the Nazi concentration camps, said the pursuer, Edward G. Robinson. Here—look at it. “This is a gas chamber. . . . This is a lime pit. . . .”
Welles himself was a fervent liberal in those days. He campaigned noisily for Roosevelt in the 1944 race and even substituted for the President in a debate with Thomas Dewey at the Astor Hotel in New York. Early in 1945, he began producing a daily editorial column, “Orson Welles’s Almanac,” in the New York Post. It started with chatter and commentary about show business but soon veered into liberal political sermons. Welles attended and applauded the birth of the United Nations in San Francisco. He worried about Washington’s apparent inability to organize a stable peace. “We are still building our Bulwarks against Bolshevism,” Welles wrote. “The phony fear of Communism is smoke-screening the real menace of renascent Fascism.”
But Welles was also an actor who yearned to play Faustus, who might cry, as Faustus did, “ ’Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me.” He no longer sawed Rita Hayworth in half for the amusement of soldiers at the Hollywood canteen, but he continued to be ravished by the possibilities in a fan of playing cards or a rabbit in a top hat. During one period of domestic difficulties early in 1946, he went east to try his repertoire of magic tricks in a spectacular stage version of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. For this, he persuaded Cole Porter to write the music, and Mike Todd to provide the financing. During the pre-Broadway tryout in Boston, however, Todd abruptly abandoned the whole project. Welles decided to see what new funds he could raise himself, starting with the fifty thousand dollars needed to pay an overdue bill for costumes. One of the few people he knew who could commit himself to such a sum in one telephone call was Rita Hayworth’s boss, Harry Cohn, the despot of Columbia Pictures.
“If you advance me the fifty thousand,” Welles supposedly proposed from a backstage telephone in Boston, “I’ll make a deal with you to write and direct a picture. I’ve got a suspense story that can be made inexpensively.”
“Yeah?” Cohn grunted. “What is it?”
Welles apparently had nothing in mind more definite than the idea that he could shoot a thriller on the streets of New York, once he got Around the World successfully launched there, but to soothe Cohn’s suspicions, he began to improvise. According to legend, he spotted a nearby stagehand reading a paperback novel titled If I Die Before I Wake, by Sherwood King, and that was enough to inspire Welles to promise mystery, dreams, wild fantasy. “Buy the novel and I’ll make the film,” he said. Cohn impulsively agreed. “Later,” Welles told an interviewer, “I read the book and it was horrible, so I set myself, top speed, to write a story.”*
First, though, there was Around the World in Eighty Days, which Welles did manage to bring to Broadway in the fall of 1946, where it received what are known as “mixed notices,” survived for seventy-four performances, and cost Welles himself the impressive sum of $350,000 in debts. “That will be enough magic for a while, thank you,” Welles remarked. And so he returned to Hollywood to submit to the dictates of Harry Cohn. What Cohn now wanted was not a cheap New York thriller but a first-class film for his biggest star, the biggest star in Hollywood, Welles’s estranged wife, Rita Hayworth.
Miss Hayworth had reached the height of a success beyond anything that Harry Cohn could understand, beyond anything that the actress herself could understand. To millions of Americans, she had mysteriously become the personification of glamour, of female beauty, of all those intangible and incomprehensible elements that could be filmed, packaged, and sold. When the United States staged its first postwar atomic test at Bikini atoll that July 1—devastating an anchored armada of seventy-five warships manned only by a captive flock of 4,800 goats, pigs, and rats—the nuclear bomb that exploded in their midst was painted with a pinup picture of Rita Hayworth and named the “Gilda.”
It was Gilda, released just that spring, that elevated Miss Hayworth beyond her triumphs as a dancer in Cover Girl and changed her into an international phenomenon, worthy of the nuclear explosion at Bikini. Like most such affairs, this legendary film was largely a series of accidents. The original screenplay was the work of one Marion Parsonnet, but Harry Cohn assigned the job of producing it to Virginia Van Upp, who had not only written Cover Girl but shepherded Miss Hayworth through all the problems of the production. And now Miss Van Upp kept rewriting Gilda, rewriting only a page or two at a time, often on the night before a scene was scheduled for shooting. “We never knew what was coming next, and we even started the picture without a leading man,” said Charles Vidor, the director.
There was a peculiar and perverted quality to Gilda. According to one theory, the relationship between the male characters was simply homosexual, at best partly repressed. According to another, the relationships were all sadomasochistic. At one point, the hero, played by Glenn Ford, contemptuously told Gilda that he had been assigned to take charge of her, “like the laundry.” Gilda reacted by playing the wanton.
The designer Jean Louis, supposedly inspired by John Singer Sargent’s famous portrait of the décolleté Madame X, created for Miss Hayworth a fetishistic black satin strapless gown, with elbow-length gloves, and the dance director Jack Cole devised the strip-tease routine in which she flung those gloves to her audience. The director, Vidor, expected the filming of “Put the blame on Mame” would be difficult, but he was pleasantly surprised the moment Miss Hayworth appeared. “She sauntered on the stage holding her head high, in that magnificent way she does,” he said, “stepping along like a sleek young tiger cub, and the whistles that sounded would have shamed a canary’s convention. She enjoyed every second of it. Then she did that elaborate difficult ‘Mame’ number in two takes.” Ford ended the dance by slapping her face, which was very much as Hollywood convention said it should be.
At the end,
the censors had to be placated, of course, and so Miss Van Upp produced a finale in which it turned out that Gilda had always been faithful and virtuous, and had just pretended otherwise to arouse her tormentor. By now everything about Rita Hayworth had become rather unreal. The trademark, the luxurious red hair, was dyed. The voice that sang was the dubbed-in voice of Anita Ellis. And now that the star was supposed to be an actress, Miss Van Upp provided the rather diffident Miss Hayworth with the false personality of a wanton. If the censors preferred that her wantonness be shown to be false, that was really quite reasonable, since Miss Hayworth’s laborious efforts to mimic wantonness depended heavily on the audience’s imagination. And yet that audience seemed to want not real sensuality so much as a confirmation of its own suspicions. Gilda descended from a long line of temptresses: Circe, Cleopatra, Lucrezia Borgia, Carmen, Nana—all beautiful, untrustworthy, ultimately malevolent, belles dames sans merci. The tradition reached a kind of apotheosis in the outpouring of film noir of the 1940’s, in the treacherous heroines of Chandler or Cain, as interpreted by Lang or Wilder. Gilda teased her men and then denied them, or so it seemed, and if Glenn Ford slapped Miss Hayworth in the face, wasn’t that what she deserved? If she was a “love goddess,” as the tabloid newspapers liked to say, she was a goddess feared and mistrusted.
This was the point at which Harry Cohn, who yearned to dominate Miss Hayworth but could never have her, assigned her to work for Orson Welles, who had had her and no longer wanted her. And Welles, who knew that the famous Gilda had very little to do with his own estranged wife, seized on the image that was already on the verge of self-parody and exaggerated it yet a little more. If Gilda was a temptress and a tease, who had sold herself to an aged millionaire, Elsa Bannister would be not only the cold young wife of a paralyzed lawyer but also a woman willing and able to lie, betray, murder. Welles’s first step was to order the famous Hayworth hair cut off.
And dyed a completely different color. Welles himself mulled over the many possibilities and then settled on something called “topaz blonde.” Columbia’s chief hair stylist, Helen Hunt, was summoned back from a honeymoon in New York to shear the studio’s most important star. “When I met Rita to do the job Orson and sixteen photographers were there in my department,” she recalled. “Orson stood over me and the Press stood on chairs all along the back. I think Orson wanted to take credit for a new Rita. . . . Rita was always being told what to do by her husbands and she did it willingly. Many people wrote for a lock; even a minister from Canada who wrote and said it was against the teachings of the bible to cut hair . . . and could he have some? The hair was finally tossed in the basket.”
The Lady from Shanghai was to be a characteristically Wellesian story of greed and deception and violence. Welles cast himself in the heroic but slightly absurd role of a thick-brogued Irish sailor, Michael O’Hara, who shipped out aboard a yacht appropriately named the Circe, on which a severely crippled lawyer named Arthur Bannister planned to sail from New York to California. Circe, of course, was the exotic Mrs. Bannister, as played by Miss Hayworth, the lady from Shanghai, who had married the lawyer only because he had blackmailed her into it. Welles cruelly trained his cameras on Bannister’s lurching canes, and even more cruelly had O’Hara say of one of his employer’s parties that it was “no more like a picnic than Bannister was like a man.” Bannister, brilliantly played by Everett Sloane, invariably addressed his blank-eyed wife as “lover,” pronouncing it every time with a mixture of hatred and despair.
The filming of The Lady from Shanghai was as chaotic as its origins. Welles apparently had imagined something in a quasi-documentary style, a bit like Louis de Rochemont’s March of Time (which he had once used as a framework for Citizen Kane), but his new film had no real locus to be documented, and no very definite script either. After only minimum preparations, under the mistrustful eye of Harry Cohn, whose only strong opinion on the matter was that he hated Rita Hayworth’s new hairdo, Welles took his cast to Acapulco, where even a well-organized and disciplined crew would have had difficulties in making a movie. Every outing into the countryside was apt to encounter alligators or poisonous snakes; clouds of insects interfered with the lighting; even a single sunbathing scene required more than two dozen Mexicans to scrape the rocks clear of barnacles. But Welles was never organized or disciplined. He rewrote the dialogue almost every day, quarreled with his actors, then took Miss Hayworth off to Mexico City to see the bullfights. The budget of $1.25 million and sixty days of shooting climbed toward $2 million and ninety days.
Most remarkable of all, Welles never saw any of the daily rushes of the film he had shot. Everything was shipped back to Hollywood, undeveloped, and there a strong-minded Columbia film editor named Viola Lawrence did what she could with it. One of her first surprises was that Welles was shooting a Rita Hayworth movie without a single close-up of his star (this was apparently his private revenge on the studio makeup technicians, who spent hours preparing Miss Hayworth for the camera). Miss Lawrence complained to Harry Cohn; Cohn ordered close-ups; Welles balked; Cohn fumed. There were worse problems. The script that Welles had so blithely hammered together out of various bits and pieces (it included not only the original thriller and his own recollections of Brazil but even a few quasi-Confucian sayings from the works of Lin Yutang) made very little sense. When Harry Cohn saw the first screening of what Miss Lawrence had put together out of the film shipped from Acapulco, he was outraged. He offered a thousand dollars to anyone who could explain the plot to him. Nobody offered; nobody got paid.
To hell with it, Harry Cohn decided. He stored away Welles’s erratic but brilliant film as a hopeless failure. More than a year passed before the authorities in the accounting department persuaded him to release a patched-together remnant, in the spring of 1948, to earn whatever it could earn. It earned very little. By then, Orson Welles was through. He had produced his strange Macbeth—all filmed in three weeks on rainy moors and leaking caves, with Welles outfitted in furs and growling in a weird Scots accent—and then fled to Europe.
His marriage to Rita Hayworth ended in November of 1947, when she testified that he spent his evenings working. “What do you expect?” said Eduardo Cansino, the eternal father. “Welles is a fine man, but you can’t leave a young girl like Rita alone while you sit up all night working.” Some persistent reporter presumably asked him to say something like that, and so he said it. Louella Parsons, who had hated Welles ever since Citizen Kane, virtually demanded that his wife join in the conventional Hollywood denunciations, but all she could get was a statement—if Miss Hayworth actually said it—that “Orson’s a genius and never forgets it. But I don’t want to say too much against him because he’s the father of my daughter. And I think if you loved a man enough to marry him, the least you could do, if you must part, is to say nothing against him.” That was an admirable philosophy—and Rita Hayworth was an admirable woman—but people kept asking her the same questions, and eventually the answers got sharper. “He was tormented, possessive, insecure . . . .” one interviewer quoted her as saying, “a genius, crazy like a horse, and a marvelous man, completely unaware of reality.”
She may, of course, never have said any such thing. And even if she said it, that did not necessarily make it true. She herself had by now become so separated from reality that she began to play principally legends: Carmen in 1948, Salome in 1953, and all the usual variations. None of them really amounted to much. After The Lady from Shanghai, Rita Hayworth, too, was finished, at the age of thirty. All unaware of her destiny, just as Welles was unaware of his, she sailed off on her first trip to Europe and there she would meet a handsome young man known as Aly Khan, who had been deeply stirred by Gilda. “Every man I’ve known,” Miss Hayworth sadly said later to Virginia Van Upp, “has fallen in love with Gilda—and wakened with me.”
Thomas Mann’s decision to build himself a house on San Remo Drive in Pacific Palisades was not inspired solely by his love of the southern California climate. Acc
ording to Janet Flanner, who wrote a New Yorker profile of Mann in 1941 under the title of “Goethe in Hollywood,” the novelist had other reasons for settling on the Pacific coast. He had begun toying with “the idea of writing a Hollywood novel as a parallel to ‘The Magic Mountain’ and its special theme of sickness.” Miss Flanner offered no details of the prospective plot or characters but reported that Mann “thinks there is a psychological condition peculiar to Hollywood which makes of it an island not unlike his island of Davos, on its Swiss mountaintop.”
Since Mann knew and cared little about movies, and since his command of English was limited, it was perhaps all for the best that he abandoned this idea and concentrated on finishing his biblical tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers (1933–44). This work did surprisingly well, and indeed made Mann rich. The final volume, Joseph the Provider, was a Book-of-the-Month Club choice in 1944 and sold about two hundred thousand copies. There was even some talk that it might fulfill another of Mann’s California ambitions, a Hollywood sale. After all, if Werfel’s Bernadette could become a successful movie, why not the famous novels of Thomas Mann?
Joseph was actually bought some years later by Louis B. Mayer, who planned it as his first independent production after his departure from M-G-M. Mayer assigned the project to a veteran M-G-M screenwriter, John Lee Mahin, and then sent Mahin’s script to David O. Selznick to see if Jennifer Jones might play the role of Potiphar’s wife. Selznick agreed, provided that the character could be made less “consistently villainous.” He thought that Mahin’s script needed “a great deal of work,” but that the possibilities in the story of Joseph were grand. “You have working for you that greatest of all showmanship combinations—sex and religion,” Selznick declared. “You have father love, mother love, brother love; you have lust and sentiment; you have a faithful husband and you have an unfaithful wife; you have complete blueprints for every conceivable production value, including spectacle, exterior scenes of great beauty, interiors of great pomp and circumstance, magnificent costumes, daring and revealing costumes, boudoir scenes, royalty and panoply, family life—indeed, the whole catalog of elements of mass appeal.” Despite all this, the film was never produced.
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