Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  With the new deal in place, he returned to Hollywood in mid-December of 1939. Houseman describes a party in the Brentwood house at which Welles announced his good news and his bad news: the postponement of Heart of Darkness, and – as a consolation prize – the imminence of The Smiler with a Knife. The urgent question of the payment of the actors during the inevitable delay while the new project was set up was broached a couple of weeks later over a supper at Chasen’s; Richard Baer, Bill Alland, Herbert Drake, Albert Schneider (now his personal manager) and Houseman were present along with Welles. The description of what he calls a ‘staff meeting’ provides a memorable set-piece in Houseman’s book. Waiting until the end of the meal before addressing the matter in hand, Welles – by now having consumed a great deal of wine, washed down with a comparable quantity of brandy – airily proposed that the actors should be taken off RKO’s payroll and put onto that of the Mercury. Being told that there was no money for this, he accused Albert Schneider of ‘pissing it away’.24 Houseman, weary of sorting out Welles’s impasses, demanded to know what he was going to do. Welles wanted to know what he would do. ‘Tell them the truth for once,’ said Houseman. At which Welles roared like a gored bull. ‘I never lie to actors!’ he howled, and then started to throw the contents of the table, including two dishes of flaming methylated spirits, at him. Houseman prudently withdrew, not just from the room, but from Los Angeles, and, he supposed, Welles’s life. Avoiding Welles’s calls and not responding to his telegrams, Houseman drove stolidly to New Mexico, where he wrote him a letter terminating their working relationship – at least, on its present basis. ‘In the past year my position with you and the Mercury has become something between that of a hired, not too effective manager, a writer under contract and an aging, not so benevolent relative,’25 he wrote, in words subtly different from those he printed in his memoir. ‘There seems to be some emotional thing between us, lately, which instead of being helpful and fruitful merely succeeds in embarrassing and paralysing us both.’ Even though he had started the letter by saying that ‘nothing that has happened recently affects the very deep affection I have for you and the very real delight I have found in association with such a talent as yours’, and ended by saying ‘nothing would make me happier than, one day, again to produce plays together’, his every word attests to the severance of the bond that had united them, their mutual dependence. ‘We have gone through too much together in the theatre and had too much joy of it for me to be willing to let our partnership follow the descending curve of misunderstandings along which I see it so clearly moving.’ They no longer complemented each other; indeed, the other’s very existence was a sort of indictment. For Welles, Houseman was the living evidence of an earlier self, a self he had left behind, the boy he was; for Houseman, Welles had grown to a monstrous independence which made him feel dowdy, small, insignificant – and petty. ‘I have found myself accepting this new position of mine not always with good grace, and I have found myself far too frequently buttressing my position with a kind of cynical, destructive passivity which I do not like any better than you.’

  Once happy with the role of witty, deep-revolving Buckingham to Welles’s Gloucester, Houseman too might have cried: ‘And is it thus? Repays he my deep service/With such contempt? Made I him King for this?’ Not only had he ceased to be important in Welles’s life, Welles had now become so public a figure that Houseman was no longer able to see the artist in him, and his association with Welles’s artistry was the elixir that made life worth living. In a letter to Virgil Thomson (also, interestingly, rewritten for publication in his memoir) he announces the break-up of their partnership, saying: ‘If an artist finds that public response can be stimulated by monkey shines (social and mechanical), then the necessity for, even the interest in, creative work inevitably dwindles. That is the main reason why, for seven months now, a picture (under the most magnificent contract ever granted an artist in Hollywood) has been “about to be made,” talked of, speculated over, defended, attacked, announced, postponed, reannounced to the tune of millions of words in thousands of publications without the picture itself (either on paper or even in Orson’s own mind) having got beyond the most superficially and vaguely conceived first draft.’26 He was wrong about the amount of work Welles had done; the reasons for the delay on the film are none the less interesting: ‘the moment it gets made it enters the world of tangible-work-to-be-appraised instead of potential-work-of-a-genius-which-can-be-talked-conjectured-about-written-about …’

  It is evident that Houseman had been looking for an occasion to precipitate their rift, and the meal at Chasen’s had served well for the purpose. He said as much in his letter to Welles: ‘what happened the other night has, of course, nothing to do with all this. It merely brought to a head a situation which I have seen existing and growing worse for some time’ and there is no reason to doubt it. As always, he analysed himself better and more harshly than anyone else could. ‘It is my great virtue that I can impart terrific initial acceleration to any project to which I am a part,’ he wrote to Thomson. ‘It is my great weakness that I am incapable (and not always desirous) of controlling or moderating its speed once it is under way.’ A day arrives when he suddenly finds himself ‘disliking the direction in which we are moving and sick of that very inertia which I have helped impose’. That day had assuredly arrived with Welles. ‘Being,’ as he says, ‘an adventurous amateur rather than a creator, an operator rather than an artist’, he hurriedly abandons ship ‘having first made quite sure that there is a safety-door open and working’. His instinct for survival was infinitely better developed than Welles’s; eventually, it led him to a life of fulfilment and satisfaction. As well as an abandonment of ship, however, that supper at Chasen’s was also, classically, a demonstration of the need to provoke a feeling, any feeling, from the estranged partner. Such was his involvement with Welles that he was not able simply to walk away from it. Not yet.

  Curiously, Welles told Barbara Leaming that he had contrived the whole incident – in order to get Houseman off salary. ‘I couldn’t say to him “you’re not working for me anymore” after all our time together and all. So mat’s why I turned over the table. It was cold-hearted. It wasn’t a BIG end of it; I just got him off salary for a while, which was all I wanted to do.’ This sounds unconvincing by the side of Houseman’s account of Welles’s bloodshot eyes and damp, white face, his cries of ‘Crook!’ and ‘Thief!’.27 Houseman’s final leave-taking proved not to be so final; but the association, that inspired partnership, that match made in heaven (as far as Houseman was concerned) had been dying for some time, and was now, in any deep sense, over. And yet Houseman was unable to resist leaving the door a little way open.

  Though he had written to Virgil Thomson of ‘the uprooting of a three years’ artistic marriage’, his letter to Welles had specifically disavowed any such thing: ‘I do not consider this a divorce from the Mercury.’ Furthermore, ‘at the risk of being wearisome,’ he insisted that ‘at this moment I love and admire you no less than ever.’ Earlier, he says that ‘nothing would make me happier than again to produce plays with you … I don’t think that the theatre will ever be as wonderful for me again as it was for two years with you.’ Nor will he cause any trouble; no one need know. In his final paragraph he assures Welles that he could rely on him to make his going to New York ‘a very natural thing’, that he would be happy to stay for a week or two to help with The Smiler with a Knife, or indeed, the radio show. He ends with the standard civilised sign-off in all would-be amicable terminations of intense relationships: ‘and now let’s have dinner together.’

  They didn’t have dinner together; not yet. Welles, to whom all the foregoing was simply a tedious irrelevance, did what he always did in situations of emotional complication: he threw himself into work, in this case preparations for The Smiler with a Knife. He had managed to persuade Schaefer that it could be turned into a popular hit along the lines of The Thin Man. The flip from Heart of Darkness to The Th
in Man is rather abrupt, though it is not unknown for desperate commercialism to be the bank holiday of high art. Day Lewis’s Nigel and Georgina Strangeways could certainly have matched Nick and Nora Charles as married sleuths, and the book has considerable entertainment potential, as Georgina stumbles upon The English Banner, a proto-fascist movement under the leadership of Lord Chilton Canteloe. Welles had changed the setting to America, North and South (with a scene set in Todd School), but it is easy to see why he was drawn to the character of Day Lewis’s charismatic fascist. Even physically he was not unlike Welles: ‘his magnetic, brown, gold-flecked eyes could turn so easily from playfulness to an almost tigerish fury of concentration … his gait lacked the incomparable grace of his head and shoulders: he walked a little clumsily, leaning forward, his arms swinging stiffly in front of him, rather like a bear.’28 And ‘Chillie’, like Kurtz, like Welles, is a verbal wizard. ‘His belief in himself was so implicit that he could never doubt, at the moment, the truth of his own words. He was a self-deceiver on the heroic scale, and of that stuff dictators are made.’

  The studio was sufficiently enthused to allow the script to be sent to Carole Lombard; she turned it down. Welles was very keen for the young and still untried Lucille Ball to play his girl sleuth, but RKO, one of whose few other contractual rights was that of employee refusal, insisted that she wouldn’t be able to carry the picture. Now Schaefer started to get anxious about the political thread in this picture too, and tried to push Welles towards other pictures which would be both less controversial and more substantial. They realised that The Smiler with a Knife, whatever its charms, was not the right first film for the ‘spectacular genius of the show world’; while Heart of Darkness, though still officially slated, seemed a more and more distant prospect. An air of desperation came over their deliberations as public humiliation loomed for both of them: Schaefer suggested The Man Who Came to Dinner (which Woollcott had wanted Welles to play on stage from the beginning, according to Brady); they considered great novels (Jane Eyre and The Pickwick Papers), history (Machiavelli, The Borgias, Cortez’s invasion of America), biography (The Life of Dumas), all and any of which could possibly have made splendid films. But to start from scratch at this late stage with no clear concept and time running out rapidly, was a hopeless prospect.

  Welles had been in Hollywood for nearly six months and was no nearer making a film than when he arrived. Meanwhile, the tricoteuses mocked with gleeful anticipation. ‘Orson Welles confers with himself in a three-way mirror, as actor, director, and producer. The actor wants something, producer says budget won’t stand it, director sees it another way. So it goes, with Little Orson Annie fighting himself … Orson Welles was chic in a silver fox beard trimmed with old RKO scripts.’ He was in a desperate corner.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Mank

  AS IT so often had, but for very nearly the last time, benevolent destiny intervened at the moment that Welles most needed it, introducing him to exactly the right person at the right time. Drawn as always to old-timers, particularly if they were also reprobates, he had been delighted to make the acquaintance in New York of the screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, only in his mid-forties but after fifteen years in Hollywood and twenty-five years on the bottle, a veteran of an industry he viewed with trenchant contempt. Author or co-author of over ninety screenplays, producer of several movies (including the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup) he was the archetypal East Coast wit, ex-foreign correspondent, sometime publicist for Isadora Duncan, former drama editor of first The New York Times then The New Yorker. He was bought up and shipped over to Hollywood at the start of the talkies boom and thrown unceremoniously into the writing factory where his gift for witty one-liners was the salvation of many another man’s script. The downside was that his own scripts were subject to amendment by yet other hands, which fed his already deep reserves of bitterness and cynicism. He could almost have been the prototype of Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby (with his ‘credits that would knock your eye out, extending up to – well, up to five years ago when Pat’s credits had begun to be few and far between’)1 except for his rebarbative wit and forceful opinions, freely expressed without regard to the sensibilities of his listeners, whose own opinions were dismissed with contempt. ‘Idiocy is all right in its own way,’2 he would roar at them, ‘but you can’t make it the foundation of a career!’

  His contempt (which was real enough) was always transmuted into laughter; few took offence, his worst behaviour invariably redeemed by a wonderful joke. Throwing up at dinner, as he often did, he managed, just before passing out, to reassure his notoriously snobbish host: ‘It’s all right. I brought up the white wine with the fish.’ He was, until his perverse political stances (pro-German, anti-Semitic) became insupportable in time of war, one of the most prized dinner guests in Hollywood, not only funny but intellectually brilliant. Welles was drawn to all that, of course, but especially to the danger: ‘you felt this fondness, though you knew that if he had a chance, he would cut you off at the knees.’3 Here was Jack Carter all over again in the form of a middle-aged, stout Jewish Voltaire. ‘Mankiewicz was some sort of tremendous performer in a Hieronymous Bosch landscape of his own. There was always the feeling that you were in the presence of thwarted violence,’ Welles told Richard Meryman. ‘It was this thrashing of some great creature, some beached creature. Some magnificent creature. You didn’t know what it was because you had never seen one of those before. It was Mank.’ Occasionally, the comments of the later Welles on Mankiewicz have an eerily premonitory autobiographical feel to them. ‘He liked the attention he got as a great, monumental, self-destructing machine … it was the vulnerability that brought the warmth out from his friends. And people loved him. Loved him. That terrible vulnerability. That terrible wreck.’ Mankiewicz for his part was drawn to Welles in an equally complicated manner. ‘It is a real genius that he has and not any particular talent or combination of talents that have become fortified or outstanding through training. He is no Meglin Kid or premature Quiz Kid. And he provokes a hero worship that makes it possible to react to his bad behaviour as if somebody else were guilty of it. God knows why. When he has walked among men, they loathe his guts. But they miss him more than they would somebody they loved.’ Mankiewicz recognised the divine spark in Welles; Welles loved Mankiewicz’s lack of compromise, his incorruptible subversiveness. This was not Falstaff, but Thersites.

  ‘Both came away,’4 wrote Houseman of their first New York meeting in that tone of naked envy and exclusion so peculiarly his own, ‘enchanted and convinced that between them they were the two most dashing and gallantly intelligent gentlemen in the Western world. And they were not far wrong.’ They were also both in trouble, financially and professionally; Welles less visibly so, perhaps, than Mankiewicz, who was not only nearly unemployable as a result of his unfettered tongue and chronic unreliability, but also now bed-bound, after a car crash in which his leg had been broken in three places. Welles was in a position to help him: he engaged him to write scripts for Campbell’s Playhouse. The first of these, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, was not an unqualified success (he omitted one of the crucial clues), but the scripts got better, partly as a result of being ‘harshly’ edited by Houseman. Welles would visit Mankiewicz at his bedside; they would mainly speak, as people in the same business will, of projects. Welles spoke of Dumas, Machiavelli and the Borgias, but also of an unformed idea for a film about some larger-than-life American figure – who, he wasn’t quite sure. So much of his work had been to do with the idea of greatness and its limitations: right back to his childhood performances, Francis Lightfoot in Wings over Europe and Richard III, on through Duke Karl Alexander in Dublin, Claudius in Woodstock, McGafferty in Panic, Doctor Faustus and Brutus, above all his still unfilmed Kurtz. He had dealt again and again with the flaws that stop extraordinary men, men of potential genius, from fulfilling their promise; it was his great subject. Now he wanted to look at his own times, to find a figure of Shakespearean, or maybe rather, Mar
lovian, scope, to address.

  Mankiewicz, a keen student of power and its abuses (which is a slightly different thing from what Welles was interested in), had, for his part, long dreamed of a screenplay about a public figure – a gangster, perhaps – whose story would be told from the many different points of those who had known him. This had already been attempted by Preston Sturges in his screenplay for The Power and the Glory (1935); and the 1930 Claude Houghton novel I Am Jonathan Scrivener presented an investigation into a man’s life from many angles. The idea was very much in the air. Mankiewicz himself had written an unperformed play (The Tree Will Grow, about the gangster John Dillinger) to this prescription: in Act One, as described by Mankiewicz’s biographer Richard Meryman, news of Dillinger’s death is brought to his family. The play is a complex and contradictory portrait gradually accumulated from the recollections of mother, father, friends, and minister. Immediately enthused by the idea of the multiple viewpoints, Welles was less excited by the idea of playing Dillinger (hardly a part for him). Instead he and Mankiewicz began to think in terms of someone nearer at hand about whom they had also chatted a great deal: William Randolph Hearst, at whose parties Mankiewicz had been a welcome guest till his alcoholism had had him barred; Hearst did everything he could to keep Marion Davies away from anyone who might encourage her fondness for the bottle. Mankiewicz, nursing his resentment, had subsequently become obsessed by both Hearst and Davies, collecting stories about them the way small boys collect stamps.