Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  If Welles was kept going by his determination to get Five Kings to New York, Houseman had no such passion, nor any appetite to continue the turbulent partnership with Welles. ‘Fatigue, humiliation, mutual reproaches and, through it all, our growing inability to communicate except in anger – all these were having their cumulative and corrosive effect on an association from which all affection seemed to have been drained and only self-interest (expressed at the moment by our weekly radio show) remained to bind us together.’39 Houseman, as always when he writes of Welles, is using the language of a love affair. This is not to impute homosexuality (though there is undoubtedly a complexity in that area which Houseman never explicitly acknowledges, while never censoring the words which give it away): collaboration of this sort is intense, personal, emotional, desperate in exactly the same way and to the same degree that a sexual relationship is. In his memoir, he is able to distance himself in stylish prose; at the time he was almost incoherent with loss and rage. ‘The Five Kings year (since Five Kings pre-influenced and pre-distorted, or post-influenced and post-distorted every single thought and action of ours that season) found us fertile, successful, happy,’ he wrote to Virgil Thomson the following year, ‘foolish, perhaps, but in love with ourselves and each other and the theatre and the public … it left us tired to the point of sickness, loaded with debts and full of hatred and distrust of each other, of our audience, of our theatre – weary and full of fear and loathing for the whole business of producing plays in the theatre. And it left me, personally, without the excitement and, worst of all, without the faith which was, during its brief, brilliant career, the essential quality of the Mercury and before that 891 and before that Macbeth.’ And, he might have added, the essential element of his relationship with Welles. He was writing to Thomson, specifically, because it was he who had given him his first taste of what he called ‘work-in-the-theatre-by-those-who-have-faith-in-each-other’. Now he began to doubt whether the youth he had plucked from Katharine Cornell’s company, for whom and with whom he had foreseen a brilliant and never-ending future, was not going seriously wrong, running out of hand both personally and artistically. ‘To tell the story of Five Kings is like trying to record the terminal stages of a complicated and fatal disease,’ he writes in Run-Through. ‘The name of our disease was success – accumulating success that had little to do with the quality of our work but seemed to proliferate around the person of Orson Welles with a wild, monstrous growth of its own.’ The crucial phrase is ‘of its own’. He had planted the seed; but now things were out of his control.

  The Mercury, as an idea, was now well and truly dead; as a name, it continued to front Welles’s activities for many years. The only remaining formal association between Welles and Houseman was the radio programme (which Houseman had held together for the duration of Five Kings) which would shortly go into its summer recess. The repertory was distinctly lowbrow: every Friday night, after the show, Welles would abandon the inscrutable horrors of the turntable and the labyrinthine complexities of the fifteenth century, for the worlds of Dodie Smith, Philip Duffield Stong or P.C. Wren (in this last – an adaptation, of course, of Beau Geste – Welles played Beau to Laurence Olivier’s John). Light relief indeed. Radio does have the tremendous advantage for an actor that it is possible in that medium to play roles that you could by no stretch of the imagination essay on stage; thus Welles played Elyot in Private Lives (opposite Gertrude Lawrence) and Vincent Price’s old role of Prince Albert, opposite Helen Hayes as Queen Victoria. He returned to Les Misérables, this time as Javert to Walter Huston’s Valjean, and played the Stage Manager in his old friend Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The level of radiophonic invention was commensurately lower with the literary and imaginative level of the writing; what can you do with Private Lives on the radio but do it, very, very well? His input during the run of Five Kings was confined to his own performance, which, almost literally, he phoned in. Paul Stewart ran the programmes very efficiently, and Houseman produced them with skill and taste. The former spark was largely missing; this proved no barrier either for the audience or for the sponsors, both of whom were highly satisfied. The programme became one of the most successful on the air. One of the few shows to stretch the medium a little had been the adaptation of William Archer’s The Green Goddess, with Welles in the role written for George Arliss, a preposterous and rather offensive melodrama which gave the author, who had spent his life fighting the genre of which it is a particularly abject example, an enormous financial success at the end of his career. Its aeroplanes and mountainside temples, the crucial telegraphic equipment, bands of mysteriously appearing soldiers all made for enjoyable radio hokum. When Five Kings finally collapsed, Welles impulsively decided to take the play on the road in the most peculiar circumstances.

  What exactly it was that made him think The Green Goddess suitable for performance on stage as part of a vaudeville act is hard to fathom, nor what drew him, a good liberal, to the part of that Nietzschean nabob, the Rajah of Rukh, with his wicked designs on the body of the hapless white woman stranded in the mountains and the lives of any other whites who might happen to be kicking around. He did, it is true, have a weakness throughout his career for epigrammatic villains, smoothly wicked men whose perfect manners conceal an abyss of wickedness, in which case the Rajah must have suited him to the ground: ‘I don’t know if I care very much for the millions that you speak of. Life is a weed that grows as fast as death mows it down.’40 Nor did his love of melodrama ever desert him. The Green Goddess, however, a pastiche written in 1920, is really scraping the bottom of the barrel in both departments. This, none the less, is what he chose to do next: a tour of the RKO Orpheum Vaudeville Circuit with Archer’s absurd farrago reduced to twenty minutes, of which five minutes – continuing the experiment he was forced to abandon in Too Much Johnson – was on film. This footage (assembled from stock on film from libraries) depicted the aeroplane crash with which the play begins; it has disappeared. Four times a day, with a full orchestra underscoring the show, he and a few remaining Mercurians slogged through selected purple passages: ‘I knew it! You are playing with me! But the confiding barbarian is not so simple as you imagine. No woman has ever tried to fool me that has not repented it. You think, when you have to pay up, you will fob me off with your dead body. Let me tell you, I have no use for you dead – I want you with all the blood in your veins, with all the pride in that damned sly brain of yours. I want to make my plaything of your beauty, my mockery of your pride’ and so on, ad libitum. A handful of people bent on entertainment sat in silent bewilderment in the vast spaces of the Palace Theatre in Chicago and the Stanley in Pittsburgh. In both places, there were technical mishaps (the crucial public address system broke down; the film was run backwards); from time to time, the ailing John Barrymore – already, Welles believed, in the grip of Alzheimer’s disease – would drop by and take over one of the roles, able to remember even less of it than he could of the role he was playing at a nearby theatre. Welles himself, amused by the absence of an audience, decided to play the Rajah as a different actor at each performance, which led to some tart comment in The New York Times: ‘when and if Five Kings actually materialises, Mr Welles is now in a position to add even more novelty to the presentation by doing Falstaff as Raymond Massey might play him, or as Jimmy Durante would do it, or maybe Victor Moore.’ They thought he was behaving idiotically, childishly, irresponsibly. He was. He was behaving like a schoolboy playing hooky – he who was supposed to be the Head Boy, the School Captain. The sense of Great Things being expected of him was oppressive.

  It is difficult to imagine the state of mind which led Welles to embark on this particular lunacy. Floored by Five Kings, he might have been expected to retreat and review his situation. Instead, he leaped off in an altogether unpredictable direction. Obviously, he thought it would make money. Equally obviously, only someone seriously out of touch could possibly think that. Melodrama, whether spoofed or not, was quite dead by 1939. The 192
0’s sense of liberation from the values of the Victorian and Edwardian past from which they had just emerged made parodied melodrama (as in The Drunkard, or the Grand Guignol seasons in Paris, London and New York) naughtily daring: sending up Mummy and Daddy. By the thirties, the thrill had long passed. Vaudeville itself was now in terminal decline. Most of the great houses had been converted into cinemas showing films starring those troupers who had so recently topped the bill live. In its great days, vaudeville had lured the biggest stars of Broadway to perform twenty-minute digests of their hits; but the age of these ‘tab’ versions (tabs being the curtains in front of which they were played) was over, too. Besides, when Alla Nazimova and other great stars had brought their trimmed-down triumphs to the vaudeville stage, they were exactly that – triumphs that were closely associated with them. Had Welles concocted – as had originally been requested – a twenty-minute version of The War of the Worlds, the box office would have been mobbed.

  There was another factor, never to be discounted with Welles: sentimentality. He had accompanied his father to the great Chicago vaudeville theatres (including, of course, the Palace) as a child at exactly the moment of its greatest peak in the mid-twenties, when, as he often recalled, Houdini, W.C. Fields and George M. Cohan were topping the bill. He would go backstage with his father, whose intimate relationship with the chorus girls led to introductions to the stars. This was the magic of the theatre for Welles – not Broadway, still less the Mercury. So, as he told Barbara Leaming, he was thrilled to have his own dressing room ‘with three rooms and bathrooms and a grand piano’.41 The interesting phrase that he uses elsewhere recurs in his conversations with Leaming: ‘it’s real stardom in vaudeville.’ The sense of having actually arrived – of being someone – remained as elusive as ever, this quixotic venture having simply added to the humiliation already inflicted in ample measure by Five Kings. Of course, both ventures (despite some marginal reporting in the New York press) had taken place out of town, and concerned a small section of the population: theatre-goers.

  The wheels of celebrity grind surprisingly slowly; to the world at large – excluding the theatre-going public of Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Pittsburgh, and not many of them – he was the young man made up to look like God Almighty on the cover of Time magazine, the triumphantly audacious perpetrator of The War of the Worlds and the suave frontman and leading actor of The Campbell Playhouse. More distantly, he was the head of something called the Mercury Theatre, which had done Julius Caesar in jackboots – still was doing Julius Caesar in jackboots, for all they knew. While Welles was crawling round the cities of the East Coast and the Middle West, his theatrical dreams collapsing all around him, on the other side of the country, unbeknown to him, the moguls of Hollywood were trying to figure out how best to deploy his talents.

  There was no lack of interest in him. Far from it: from as early as Julius Caesar the New York office of RKO had noted that he was ‘such a brilliant talent that he cannot be ignored’. The studios’ overtures suggest that they were uncertain of how to use him. In 1937, David O. Selznick, having seen Doctor Faustus, invited him to head his story department, a bold and imaginative notion which Welles naturally, and rightly, turned down because, he wrote to Selznick, it would not ‘represent a step toward my ultimate aim: my profession of actor-director’. Warner Bros were equally uncertain as to what kind of an actor he was: that same year of 1937, they approached him about playing a role in The Adventures of Robin Hood: either Friar Tuck or King Richard – which is like wondering if an actor would be better as Hamlet or Polonius. The offer was turned down on financial grounds, but Welles had no intention of joining the ranks of young hopefuls in Hollywood; above all, he was not going to mortgage his soul to a studio. The contract system was now at its height; those few actors who had attempted to defy it had been cast out of the celluloid Garden of Eden. Hollywood represented in his eyes an abject deal; you surrendered your freedom – as an artist, as an individual – for gold, whether you were an actor, a director or a writer, and he was all three. As far as he could see, in 1937 the only place where he could exercise his ‘profession of actor-director’ was the theatre. Nothing less would satisfy him. In motion pictures, the only practising member of that profession was Charles Chaplin, who was a case apart. Erich von Stroheim, the only other serious contender, had been effectively debarred from directing since the débâcle of Queen Kelly ten years earlier, his career an awful example of the punishment meted out to those who refuse to compromise artistically – or financially. Small encouragement there. Above all, Welles was nervous of the figure of the producer, controlling, authorising, permitting, refusing. This was merely Houseman writ large. He was all for father-figures, until they told him what to do. Then he was off. So he held the moguls at arm’s length, while graciously allowing himself to be, from time to time, screen-tested.

  Not that he was uninterested in the movies. Despite his avowed commitment to the theatre, his statements on the subject were becoming gloomier and gloomier, while he began to speak more and more warmly about film. ‘The theatre has lost its narrative style,’42 he jotted down in his Lecture Notes on Acting of 1938. ‘The novel took over,’ he somewhat questionably continued. ‘The novel exhausted itself and the movie took over from there. The movies can do narrative, character, ideas, mood – unquestionably the most flexible form imaginable.’ He was coming round to it, no question. At one of the early peaks of the Mercury’s success, he had announced the filming of all the productions, and of course Too Much Johnson had given him a practical taste of the excitement that filming can bring. He simply wanted it on his terms. His continuing resistance to all blandishments made the Hollywood headlines. ORSON WELLES GIVING METRO THE PIX CHILL,43 reported Variety at the end of 1937. Successful tests had caused MGM to tender him ‘a juicy offer’ drooled Variety, with ‘company toppers seeing strong possibilities. Player, however, prefers the legit and nixed offers that would bring him permanently to Hollywood.’ Welles, the report continued, had even held out against an offer of a contract which would release him for a few months every year for stage work. He said he ‘preferred it the other way round, a few months for pictures and the remainder of his time on the stage’.

  The studio that pursued him with the greatest ardour was RKO, fittingly enough, since its existence – its very name – was the outcome of a liaison between the interests of radio and celluloid, which Welles, in turn, was ideally placed to embody. Radio-Keith-Orpheum was the brainchild of David Sarnoff, head of the Radio Corporation of America. It was Sarnoff who created the slogan ‘A Radio Picture’ which appeared under the logo of a radio transmitter prefacing every RKO film. Eager to link up his sound technology with movies as they rushed headling into talkies, he had bought into the Robertson-Cole Film Company, at the same time acquiring the Keith-Albee-Orpheum circuit of vaudeville theatres for conversion into cinemas – a brilliant manoeuvre, linking technology with production and production with distribution. A TITAN IS BORN, said the headlines. However, as Richard Jewell observes in The RKO Story, the new company failed to develop either a guiding philosophy or continuity of management for any length of time. ‘As a result, RKO’s films tended to reflect the personality of the individual in charge of the studio at any given time – and since this time was always short, a dizzying number of diverse individuals became involved in RKO’s creative affairs over the years, and the pictures never evolved an overall style unique to the studio.’ In the late thirties, RKO’s latest ‘individual in charge of the studio’, George J. Schaefer, had instituted radical and ambitious changes in policy, seeking to turn it into a ‘prestige’ studio. Welles, in one form or another, was a catch he was determined to net.

  Schaefer enters Welles’s life in around 1938; as one of the most important instruments of his destiny, he is worth a little consideration. Fifty years old when he took over RKO, he had been in the business for twenty-five years, almost as long as it had existed. Starting as Louis J. Selznick’s secretary, he
was, said his obituary in Variety, ‘the last of the old line of top-flier industry chieftains who were the architects of the distribution system’. Sales were his sphere, and he was as successful in building them as anyone in Hollywood; as general manager and vice-president of United Artists, his work in selling their output in 1938 ensured that he alone of the senior management survived Sam Goldwyn’s putsch of that year. Wisely, he took his leave of the organisation to take over from Leo Spitz – once Capone’s lawyer – as Corporate President (business head) of RKO. ‘A bulldog of a man,’ as Variety said, ‘who was often referred to in fear and admiration as The Tiger’, Schaefer made it clear that he wanted total control, soon ousting Pandro S. Berman, one of the master producers of the age, and taking over as production chief himself. He proved to be no crass front-office man. If anything his plans erred on the side of art: embarking on a huge spending spree, he bought up as many literary properties, stars and directors as he could, often in one-sided deals which disadvantaged the studio. Similarly (since he had no artistic ambitions himself) he encouraged the development of unit production, engaging independent producers like Sam Goldwyn and Erich Pommer to work under RKO’s banner. It was a dazzling burst of confidence from a studio which – only just about to emerge from receivership – had had a rocky, if intermittently glorious, history. It was as part of that surge of expansion that Schaefer courted Welles.

  He was at first reluctant to consider Welles’s directorial ambitions, seeking to win him with ever-better acting roles. First he offered him the part of Quasimodo in the forthcoming Hunchback of Notre Dame to be directed by Dieterle; like Robert Morley before him, he turned it down, as he turned down Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The stakes were rising substantially, but Welles stuck to his guns. Actor-director or nothing. He was very careful, too, about the choice of parts. He would presumably have relished playing either Quasimodo or Jekyll/Hyde on stage; on screen he knew that character acting was only rarely compatible with stardom. He had thought a great deal about the archetypal quality possessed by stars; he was not going to be the next Laughton or Muni, dependent on their vehicles. Schaefer’s board would have been only too delighted for Welles to fight The War of the Worlds all over again, but he wisely steered clear of that, too. Schaefer was sympathetic; Welles, he told the board, ‘does not want to be the horror man’. MGM, also slightly nervous of offering him an assignment as a director, instead talked to him about being script consultant and leading actor in a film version of the FTP’s great success, It Can’t Happen Here; once war was engaged in Europe, the project folded because of nervousness about offence to Germany and Italy.