Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  Such sights must have spoken deeply to the aspect of Welles that had fallen in love with the Aran Islands and their vanished civilisation. For Welles, who was there to illustrate the plays of Shakespeare, it may have occurred to him that this culture had more in common with the Elizabethan world than the Elizabethan world does with our own: a structured world, one in which simple tools performed the daily tasks, where the community existed as a living whole, and where religion audibly and visibly penetrated every moment of the waking day. He’d seen China, Japan, rural Ireland, he’d spent time on an American Indian reservation. Here was yet another manifestation of human culture, entirely different again. If travel really does broaden the mind, few people of his age can have had greater breadth; few people of any age.

  So far, so credible. The story now modulates into the Thousand and One Nights mode. Welles-Scheherazade told Barbara Leaming (and no one else) that travelling around Tangiers and its outskirts in buses, having presumably seen and tired of the Souk, the Casbah and the seemingly unending beach (the second longest in the world), he bumped into an elderly Dutch miniature water-colourist, a curator at the Rijksmuseum. They palled up and travelled together for some weeks. This is a familiar pattern: Mr O’Connor in Ireland and Larry the Archer had been previous travelling companions. The elderly Dutchman, it transpired, was expected at the court of Thami el-Glaoui, Pasha of Marrakesh, so they headed in that direction. In doing so (assuming they did) they would have been taking a route that had only recently been opened up and was treacherous to negotiate. The Hachette Guide to Morocco of 1924 firmly pronounced, under the heading TOURING AND EXCURSIONS AMONG THE NATIVES that ‘the time for distant trips in the mountains and in the Sahara has not yet come: it is necessary to wait till the political situation has improved in those parts, and the still rebellious tribes have made their submission’. By 1930, the same guide was cautiously looking forward to ‘the possibility’ of travel to the mountains. A year earlier, a dogged young Englishman (Richard Hughes, later author of A High Wind in Jamaica) had with great difficulty reached the same destination by donkey. But it is just possible; let us assume that our odd couple, an enormous plump American, laden with Elizabethan dramas, pen, paper and ink, and an elderly Dutch curator with his artist’s materials, arrived together in Marrakesh.

  The sight that greeted them would have made Tangiers seem like a rather ordinary resort. ‘It was the year 1346 of the Mahometan calendar,’17 wrote Hughes, ‘but it might as well be 1346 A.D.’ Gavin Maxwell has a fine passage about it: ‘Much as Europeans visualize the Baghdad of the thousand and one nights, but more beautiful than Baghdad ever was, for Baghdad lacked the savage glories of the Atlas as a background to the jewels of palace and garden, orchard and lake, and the glittering green-tiled minarets of the mosques.’18

  The old Dutchman, according to Leaming, then introduced himself to the legendary Pasha and his household, and he and Welles were extended full hospitality. They were taken on picnics; every night after feasting and music and dancing, the Europeans retired, six to a tent, where they shared among them one of the concubines.

  It is hard to tell whether it is the way Mrs Leaming tells these things (she may simply be transcribing what Welles told her) but these stories lack the ring of truth. They sound made up. The crucial encounters are missing: what happened when Welles himself met the Glaoui? Was he reunited with the Glaoui’s son, his bosom friend? How did he feel about having sex in front of five other men? And what about the Dutchman with whom he roamed this exotic and rather frightening country for weeks on end? What did they talk about? Did they keep in touch later? And when and where and how did Welles do the drawings (because he did do them)? Mrs Leaming simply reports the seasoned travelling companions parting with a mere formal goodbye.

  If the account of Welles’s stay at the court of the Glaoui is true, it is quite extraordinary how little Welles was affected by these amazing experiences: in his subsequent letters he still seems the lively boy, extrovert, full of beans, not specially sophisticated. No Rimbaud, he. Perhaps precocious experience does not, in fact, produce maturity. Perhaps, in fact, someone who has at an early age run the gamut of experience is keen to recover the youthfulness that his experience denies; perhaps, as it is impossible to integrate the experience into everyday life, it is imperative to behave as if it hadn’t happened, so Welles’s encounter with the great warrior-chieftain was compartmentalised, along with his other exotic experiences. A simpler interpretation suggests itself: Welles had heard some of the many stories current about the Glaoui and absorbed them into his own traveller’s tales. The Glaoui was a much publicised figure not only in Morocco, but in France, too. ‘In the 1920s,’ according to Gavin Maxwell, ‘T’hami became, among many Europeans, a fashion, like American jazz, or the Charleston dance, or the new art form of cubism. To be aware of “The Glaoui’’,19 and to be able to speak of him with familiarity, was equivalent to what was known forty years later as being “with it”.’ The publication of the scurrilous Son Excellence, a detailed but ignorant denunciation of him by the French left-wing lawyer of his exiled enemy, had created a sensation in Paris at exactly the time of Welles’s post-Dublin trip there. The book and the furore surrounding it would certainly have made an impact on Welles. It would be a natural and not altogether reprehensible instinct, in telling tales about his Moroccan sojourn, to put the Glaoui into the story. And when he met the old Dutch curator, and they chummed up, Welles put him into the story, a little narrative link to explain his encounter with the Glaoui. Later he may have thought that meeting the Glaoui’s son in Paris would be more credible; when in reality, none of these stories makes him more interesting: the mere fact of a seventeen-year-old loose in Tangiers in the early 1930s is quite fascinating enough in itself. Roger Hill wearily admitted in an interview in the early forties that pretty well all the stories about Welles originated with Welles himself: a magnificent Münchhausen, Skipper called him. In an interview in the late thirties, Welles recounted a modest version of the el-Glaoui stories, adding rather sadly: ‘But no one believes me, so I’ve stopped talking about them any more.’ The boy who cried wolf.

  If he did stay in the royal palace in Marrakesh, he would have had a stupendous experience, and if he had met the Glaoui himself, he would have encountered an unforgettable figure. ‘Vast banquets,’20 writes Maxwell, ‘hospitality that included the bestowal of almost priceless gifts; a delicately handled air of omnicompetence … to Europeans T’hami gave, literally, whatever they wanted, whether it might be a diamond ring, a present of money in gold, or a Berber girl or boy from the High Atlas.’ The Glaoui had sedulously cultivated his personal myth; it was an essential factor in maintaining his rule. His regime was perilously sustained; its survival was a feat of theatrical illusion, backed up by a wide and ruthless intelligence network which ensured that inconvenient people were simply rubbed out, although he did not, disappointingly, kill his own son with a bow-string, as Welles liked to say, nor did he, as Mrs Leaming reports, put an enemy in a cage, like Iago at the beginning of Welles’s Othello. That was someone else.

  The Glaoui was quite Jacobean enough, though, as eye-witness reports of the man himself confirm. Harris, the correspondent of the London Times, described how he had once stripped to show off his scars: there was hardly enough of his body unscarred for Harris to be able to put his palm on. ‘The curious droop of his mouth is due to the severing of a tendon on his face … the truth of his withered hand … was that Glaoui was once besieged in a fort which was about to fall to the enemy: he evacuated his men and remained behind alone to blow up the powder magazine as the enemy entered, and that was how his hand was rendered useless.’21 In his contradictoriness, simultaneously savage and suave, he was the sort of man whom Welles would later delight to depict; an Arkadin or a Mr Clay. This was the world, then, that Welles would have known as a guest of the Glaoui. He would have had experiences unlike anything life had prepared him for. Such experiences would not be calculated to increase his sen
se of reality; it would be like taking LSD. These were the stories with which he regaled his actors during breaks in rehearsal; these are the stories with which, later, he regaled Mrs Leaming. They amount to a reverse mirror of his Merrie Englands: a brutal, savage, but somehow chivalrous world in which men were men, and life was lived with pure, fierce intensity. Whatever the reality, his imagination had certainly lived that life, and it was one he would over the years try to put on the stage or the screen.

  He gave another version of his time in Marrakesh to a New York journalist in 1938: ‘I went to Africa – to the High Atlas mountains – taking a trunkful of Elizabethan dramas with me. It sounds crazy doesn’t it? But I swear that is what I did. I stayed at a castle in the mountains; it belonged to an Atlas chieftain, and the name of the place was unbelievable – Glaoni, pronounced Glowny. Nothing happened in that romantic spot except that I read my way right through the Elizabethan period. You see, I went there to write my book on Shakespeare. I didn’t do much writing, after all … but I did a lot of reading – and that was when I got my admiration for the Elizabethan theatre.’ This has a ring of truth about it; but how did he get to the mountains? Did he meet the Glaoui? If not, why not? The only person who could have told us is Welles, and it seems that he no longer knew what was true and what was fable. From Marrakesh, at any rate, he went, briefly, to Casablanca, and thence to Spain, to Seville.

  There is a radically alternative version to all this, comic in its difference, told by one of the most diligent promulgators of Wellesian myth: Professor Frank Brady. According to the good professor, Welles arrived, not in Tangiers at all, but in Casablanca, and there he stayed till – for ‘unexplained reasons’ – he made for Tangiers, and thence Spain. While in Casablanca, he stayed, courtesy of Brahim el-Glaoui, in a house maintained by the Coca-Cola company, of which Thami el-Glaoui was vice-President; which, indeed, he was. This is a version of his Moroccan sojourn that Welles never put about.

  What is not in question is that he went to Spain, which in its way was every bit as extraordinary and exotic as Morocco, its people possessed and obsessed with pride and honour. Seville itself – birthplace of Velázquez and Murillo, with its Catedral, Giralda, and Alacazar among the most famous buildings of Spain, its religious functions unrivalled even by those of Rome – was proudly separate from the rest of Spain, and on another planet from the rest of Europe. This is the Spain of the imagination, the Spain of Carmen, and certainly must have seemed so to Welles, since he went to stay in the Triana, the gypsy quarter. There is an interesting and admirable tendency on his part – it may have been to some extent financially dictated – to avoid hotels and touristic quarters. He did it in Ireland: he did it in Lac du Flambeau; now he was doing it in Seville, seeking to become part of the life of the community. He placed himself right at the centre of it by staying over a brothel. The Triana was at once picturesque and squalid, the industrial quarter which has been noted since early antiquity for its potteries. Capek, in Spain two years before, described the district: ‘There are some tiny cottages with clean patios, with a regular gypsyish abundance of children, mothers suckling their babies, almond-eyed girls with a red flower in their blue-black hair, slender gypsy-lads with a rose between their teeth, a peaceable Sunday crowd taking its ease on its doorsteps … suddenly, in the distance a clatter of castanets became audible, and through the narrow streets of Triana glided a high car, dragged by oxen and festooned with wreaths and an abundance of tulle curtains, canopies, trimmings, flounces, drapery, veils and all sorts of other fallals’22 – a scene that can equally be seen, minus the castanets, in Morocco, where a wedding procession, led by a garlanded cow, will suddenly erupt through the alleys. Life is on the streets, not behind closed doors, another distinctly unAmerican phenomenon. Across the river from the Triana, and impossible to ignore, was – Carmen again – the Tobacco Factory: ‘They are employed, some five thousand of them, at the Fabrica de Tabacos, a huge building between the Jardines del Alcazar and Jardin del Palacio. It is like a harem, this immense house full of women, and certainly the most melancholy and distressing spectacle in Seville,’23 wrote Hutton, ‘it is a herd, a legion, an army that is broken.’

  Welles supported himself, he said, by writing pulp fiction for which he got paid well enough to live ‘like Diamond Jim Brady’. Whenever the cash ran out, he just sat down and knocked off another story and sent it back to Chicago. This is to place a great deal of faith in the mail, but no doubt it was better then. The stories concerned a young detective living with his aunt in Baltimore, he told Barbara Leaming, ‘expressly based on what Orson imagined his father’s youth to have been like’.24 It would be interesting to see the stories; they have, alas, disappeared. With the profits from them, he entertained his neighbours, ‘buying drinks,’ as he put it, ‘for half Andalucia’. Whatever was left over he spent on bulls. He had been reading Hemingway’s just published Death in the Afternoon, and was determined to participate in the primitive masculine rituals it describes. There was of course no question of him training formally to become a bull-fighter. His only chance of getting into the corrida was the way Hemingway had managed it: at the amateur free-for-all bull-fights held each morning, where the bulls’ horns were padded. Carlos Baker in his life of Hemingway has a passage about it which may closely resemble Welles’s experience: ‘wearing white pants and waving a red cape, he made the legitimate bull-call – HUH, TORO, TORO! – and the animal charged. Ernest manfully grabbed the padded horns and succeeded in bulldogging the animal to the ground … they performed each day before 20,000 fans … the whole town split into two factions, humanitarians who wanted them to quit while they were alive, the rest to make certain that the Americanos would appear.’25

  Welles could also have pitted himself (for a small consideration) against the cows used in training torreros. Death in the Afternoon gives an idea of what this was like: ‘sometimes with naked horns, sometimes with the points covered with a leather ball, they come in as fast and lithe as deer to practice on the amateur capemen and aspirant bullfighters of all sorts in the capeas; to toss, rip, gore, pursue and inspire with terror these amateurs until, when the vacas tire, steers are led into the ring to take them out to rest in the corrals until their next appearance.’ Having read this passage, Welles would have had no doubt about the real violence and danger involved in the sport. Even if he did it only once, it betrays a degree of physical courage and nimbleness, from someone noted for neither, that is breathtaking. Was he persuaded as a dare to get into the ring? Or did he force himself to do it? Must he, like Hemingway, ‘prove himself? It is interesting that the bull-fight is the very embodiment of that quintessentially Spanish ideal, majismo, a working-class reaction against the perceived effeminacy and decadence of eighteenth-century Spanish middle-class life. Unlike the effeminate Europeans, Spanish men must be men, and Spanish women must be women. Hemingway’s attraction to the concept has always been felt to betray some underlying anxiety; perhaps Orson (‘the bitch boy’) too wanted to prove something to himself. Perhaps, on the other hand, he was just in it for the hell of it. He came out with a wound, which must have been very gratifying, though the wound – in the familiar way – tended to travel a little. Sometimes it was on his lip (Barbara Leaming), sometimes on his thigh (Tynan).

  He said an interesting thing to Peter Bogdanovich26 on the subject of his career in the corrida. ‘I’d never have got myself out there on the sand in front of the twisted horns of a perfect cathedral of a becerro (calf) – and before audiences of short-tempered and supercritical Andalusian bull experts – if I’d really been scared. No, what made that little taurine caper possible was what had made it possible for me, a year earlier, to launch myself in show-business not as a spear-carrier but as a star. What got me up there on stage and out there in the bull-ring wasn’t a lack of nerves, it was an absolutely perfect lack of ambition. I saw no glorious future for myself in either episode.’

  Clearly he had no ambition to be a bull-fighter. It is interesting tha
t he felt obliged to insist that he had no ambition as an actor, either, when every letter he wrote suggests the exact opposite. It is possible, though, that as long as he wasn’t at home, he could put off the insistent demands, both his own and those of others, that he get on and do something, be somebody. Every indication that we have suggests a blazing ambition, an enormous compulsion to cut a swathe in the world. It may be that he was trying to escape that nagging, imperious demand by travelling. At least he would be able to say when he returned that he hadn’t wasted his time: he’d proved himself in the bull-ring.

  He returned to Chicago. Once back there, he was unable to deliver very many drawings. ‘All that hot summer of 1933 I had kept Orson slaving in a Chicago Rush Street “studio” just large enough for one small bed and one oversize drawing board,’27 wrote Roger Hill. ‘There he turned out literally thousands of detailed sketches, most of them crumpled and thrown away in angry frustration by a self-critical young artist. But I saved over twelve hundred and these went to press.’ And if this were not enough to eat up Welles’s energies, Skipper invited him to direct the Todd Troupers in Twelfth Night, in Hill’s own edition, for the Chicago Drama League. He played Malvolio – in a somewhat swashbuckling, Italianate makeup if the photograph is anything to go by – and designed it, too, after a picture-book design for an earlier production by Kenneth MacGowan, Robert Edmond Jones’s collaborator. It’s unlike Welles simply to copy another man’s work. The suggestion was Skipper’s; if this lack of creative contribution indicates a certain half heartedness on Welles’s part, that would be understandable. From the High Atlas Mountains and the corrida to the Chicago Drama League must have felt like a retrogressive move.