by Simon Callow
Rampaging in all directions, Belfrage reports that ‘there are in Hollywood a score of cameramen, a score of writers, a score of sound experts, a score of make-up artists – all equal to Orson’s men in their own field – is probably to underestimate. For years they have been hoping and trying for a chance to show their skill and originality, but always the film salesman, speaking through the producer, has the last word; and the film salesman is one trained in not seeing the wood for the trees.’ Belfrage’s peroration elects Welles to supreme status among film-makers. ‘Citizen Kane is correctly described as being “by Orson Welles” – not “produced” or “directed” or “from a story” by Welles, but by him. And because it is all by him, because of his conception and coordination of the work, his collaborators on camera and art direction and sound and all the rest shine more brightly. He is the biggest man in Hollywood today. And he is the Prince Charming whose bold smacking kiss on the brow of a bewitched art puts us all in his debt.’ Once again, Welles and Welles’s film become causes célèbres: once again, it is almost impossible to separate his real merits, personally and as an artist, from the circumambient hyperbole.
Now the task was to sell the movie. Whatever criticisms or cavils there may have been, there was no shortage of selling angles; the press pack bulged with ecstatic quotes, including many in the exhibitors’ press: ‘A super effort!’ hollered Chick Lewis in the Showmen’s Trade Review. ‘To showmen we say, see this picture! To those who play it there is the plain duty to themselves to give it every ounce of showmanship they possess in exploiting its extraordinary box-office potentialities.’ Schaefer set about doing what he did best: selling. He launched into a positive orgy of salesmanship. The RKO Publicity Department turned out an interesting booklet for distribution to exhibitors: it starts with a picture of Welles/Kane, in his legs akimbo, arms outstretched poster position, now standing astride the globe: AMERICA, LAND OF OPPORTUNITY: EVERYWHERE NEWSPAPER, MAGAZINE AND RADIO VOICES SAID: GO WEST ORSON WELLES TO HOLLYWOOD. There is a picture of a cactus, then a palm tree, then the gates of Xanadu. BUT THE GATES WERE CLOSED: there is a padlock on this last word, and a huge hand held up minatorily. The page is studded with unfavourable quotes from Welles’s first year in Hollywood. Then: CAME THE PREVIEW, CAME THE VERDICT. Ecstatic quotes now vie with each other on the page. The climax of the booklet is a personal message from George J. Schaefer: ‘THANK YOU ORSON WELLES! CITIZEN KANE IS A VERY FINE PRODUCTION, THE RESULT OF GREAT INITIATIVE AND COURAGE, ESPECIALLY UNDER THE MOST TRYING OF CIRCUMSTANCES. The essence of show business is to present the new, the novel and the unusual to the public. You were not given the chance to present your ideas, but you were severely criticised for even daring to have an idea! You were condemned before being tried! Your triumph is one of the great accomplishments in motion picture history, and proof that America is still the land of opportunity, where there will always be room for those with dreams and the courage to bring them to reality. RKO PICTURES INC – GEORGE J. SCHAEFER, PRESIDENT.’ This personal endorsement is surely unprecedented in the history of film publicity.
It was backed by a souvenir booklet which might have been entitled He’s Terrific! The frontispiece shows a pipe-sucking, deep-thinking Orson. Page one tells us about THE AMAZING MR WELLES, accompanied by photographs of him on the radio, as Faustus, as Brutus, as himself, hatted and bearded looking merrily into the mirror: the text tells us that after a couple of false starts ‘finally he went to work producing Citizen Kane from his own story of an American colossus striding across sixty years of living history. He directed it, starred in it, learned to dance for it, put all his recently acquired knowledge to work, picked up more as he went along. When it was finished, he supervised the scoring, too.’22 This was news, perhaps, to Bernard Herrmann. Page two, optimistically entitled MAN OF ENDLESS SURPRISES tells ‘the story of Orson Welles, or the case history of one of America’s most amazing young geniuses … he showed a surprising proclivity for painting. He was so good, as a matter of fact, that his instructor predicted he would become America’s greatest painter.’ That is new. Page three brings HIGHLIGHTS IN THE LIFE OF CITIZEN KANE, page four the credits for Kane. Pages five and six break into capital letters again: NOW IT’S ORSON WELLES OF HOLLYWOOD: QUICK-STEPPING THROUGH A FEW OF THE OUTSTANDING SCENES OF CITIZEN KANE WITH THAT UNPREDICTABLE PERSONALITY, ORSON WELLES, WHO BRINGS TO THE SCREEN IN HIS FIRST PRODUCTION AN UNUSUAL, COMPELLING, DRAMATIC ENTERTAINMENT – AND A DISTINCT NEW MOTION PICTURE TECHNIQUE THAT IS YEARS AHEAD OF ITS TIME. Pages seven and eight celebrate THE ‘FOUR-MOST’ PERSONALITY OF MOTION PICTURES! in four photographs of Welles as author, director, producer, star. Page nine introduces us to those shadowy figures, THE MERCURY ACTORS. Their photographs are dominated by a much larger one of Welles, his arms outstretched. Pages ten and eleven give us THE MASTER OF MAKE-UP. (EVEN THE FIGURES PROVE THAT ORSON WELLES DOES THINGS IN A BIG WAY.) Pages twelve and thirteen describe how Welles reinvented the cinema, STAR ORSON WELLES MAKES FLUID CAMERA THE STAR OF CITIZEN KANE: ‘It’s a revolution: Welles blandly said a room wasn’t a room without ceilings, and he wanted ceilings.’ The final page is the celebrated shot of Kane standing on the piles of newspapers, which, in this context, looks like an image of Welles’s own destiny: a man made into a giant by standing on top of a mountain of newsprint.
Under a particularly noble head of Welles as the middle-aged Kane, drawn by von Hentschel, the text further tells us that ‘Orson Welles comes to the film industry with more salvos of advance and current publicity than have ever been given to any showman. His career, past and present, makes national and international news. Every publication in the country reports his spectacular activities. He has become the best-known showman of his generation.’ An interesting phrase, and indubitably true. Early on, the campaign shifted its emphasis from the controversial many-sidedness of Kane to the love interest. ‘THE FILM THAT HIT FRONT PAGES FROM COAST TO COAST. The love story that “dared not be made.” WIFE NO 1: society belle. He gave her everything but the one thing she wanted. WIFE NO 2: shop girl. She scoffed at his $60,000,000 – broke his heart. What was the fatal weakness of the world’s richest man?’ IT’S TERRIFIC! SEE WHY AMERICA IS ONE BIG GOSSIP COLUMN ABOUT ORSON WELLES/CITIZEN KANE. So she walked out on $60,000,000! Would you? THE LOVE STORY HOLLYWOOD DARED US TO FILM! WHISPERED AND RAVED ABOUT FOR ONE SOLID YEAR … AND AT LAST IT’S HERE.’ This press release (designed for exhibitors) emphasised Welles’s marketability. ‘91% of the population know of and are curious about Welles. Citizen Kane … was a sensation even before it was released … into Citizen Kane Welles has put all the fascinating vitality which distinguished him from the ordinary showman. The result is simply TERRIFIC. The phrase’ confides the press release, ‘has great shock value to the reader. Standing alone, it permits no argument, no choice. A solid use of the campaign cannot fail to excite tremendous audience attention.’
Alas, the prophecy was not accurate. Schaefer was to some extent still baulked by the continuing efforts of the Hearst organisation. Spyros Skouras of 20th Century Fox had refused to take the movie for his theatres; many other theatres submitted to RKO’s muscle and accepted it but never showed it. In the cities business was good initially, but quickly slid even in New York, where it closed after fifteen weeks. In the regional theatres, despite a special low-price launch, things were much worse. Among exhibitors, the picture became a byword for disaster. Charles Higham quotes the report of the manager of the Iris Theatre of Velva, North Dakota: ‘Stay away from this. A nightmare. Will drive ’em out of your theatre. It may be a classic, but its plum “nuts” to your show-going public.’23 By the end of the year it had closed everywhere, not to be seen widely again in America till RKO sold its library to television; the renewal of interest in the film caused by this persuaded RKO to revive it in movie theatres, where it consolidated its influence but still failed to make money. Even its fiftieth anniversary comeback was disappointing; but its influence – or more precisely, its inspiration – had by now grown to st
upendous dimensions. In Europe, it became a virtual textbook for the new criticism; in England, famously, the movie magazine Sight and Sound polled its readers to discover that Citizen Kane was the most popular of all films, a position it has never lost. Among the cognoscenti, that is; seeming prohibitively avant-garde to ordinary film-goers in 1941, it now seems dreadfully old-fashioned to them. Virtually every film maker to whose work the public flocks, however, has been in some way affected by its example. It is the supreme expression of the legend of Orson Welles; no one has ever been able to see the film without thinking about him, frame by frame, whether to curse him or to bless him. His young self has been trapped in it, like a fly in amber.
Citizen Kane, as well as being the first, is also the last fully achieved, uncompromised work of Welles’s career – except, perhaps, for Moby Dick, which ran to rather poor business for three weeks in London, in 1955. Welles had done Kane exactly the way he wanted to, under ideal conditions; it failed commercially, despite the biggest brouhaha in the history of the cinema. In the wake of that failure, the nightmare that he had striven so hard and, he thought, so successfully to avoid became his fate for the rest of his career: interference, containment, manipulation, limitation. It is a melancholy truth that he had, by May of 1941, at the age of twenty-six created a body of work in several media that he would never surpass: in the theatre, in radio, in book illustration, in film. In each of these spheres, he had made his mark as an innovator, although it is closer to the truth to say that he was an inspired consolidator; his work was an end, rather than a beginning. Certainly it proved so for him. Denied by temperament and circumstances the opportunity to develop his work, every new venture was conceived, produced and finally delivered in such a constant glare of publicity that it was never possible for him quietly to cultivate his talent. Driven from within to achieve ever more, his work in all the areas in which he was employed had been amazingly accomplished for one so young; it did not, however, contain the seeds for future development. The same may be said of his personality, equally completely formed at an uncommonly early age. In fact, the work is the personality, the personality the work to an alarming degree. His creations have no autonomy; they are but his creatures. The first person singular, whether frankly and formally, as in much of his output, or simply in applause-seeking virtuosity of execution, is unavoidable. It was not a question of early maturity, either in his work or his being, as of forced growth. Thus he and his work of this period are brilliant but somehow lacking in illumination; full of flavour, but unnourishing. This was exceptionally stimulating both for his collaborators and his audiences; but only briefly. There is about both man and work a drive and a barely controlled feverish energy that suggests that the centre cannot hold, that things will fall apart.
The remaining forty-five years of Welles’s life are a sort of sustained falling apart in which, Lear-like, as his world crumbled further and further around him, and as his own behaviour became more and more extravagant, he was vouchsafed extraordinary insights. Mocked by a world in which he was famous for fish-fingers and sherry, fatness and a cameo role in a film directed by somebody else, denied access to the means of production, he began to explore his medium further and further, no longer exclusively – or at all – interested as he had been in his earlier years, in results. Still reluctant to go within, to examine himself, he produced, in more and more original forms, a body of wildly uneven work that could never have been predicted from his early efforts. His engagement with his own personality led to the complete abolition of the dividing wall between himself and his creations; but he came increasingly, as he and his legend, the legend of the self-destroyed artist, grew to monumental dimensions, to display himself as a phenomenon. He became a figure of pity and terror. He had no castle, no baronial mansion: the world was his Xanadu; he roamed its corridors, looking for money with which to make films, but also, beyond that, for the chances which he had lost. Eventually, he found an extraordinary benevolence towards life, coming finally to smile even on his younger self, that self preserved for ever in Citizen Kane.
Welles was not unduly daunted by the commercial failure of Citizen Kane. He had projects by the dozen: not one but three South American films in a sort of compendium form under the title It’s All True, an adaptation of an Eric Ambler novel, Journey into Fear, and Booth Tarkington’s Mid-Western family saga, The Magnificent Ambersons, all three of which he started shooting in the fall. He started a new radio programme, Orson Welles’s Almanac, consisting of adaptations of short stories, skits and poems. The Magnificent Ambersons and Journey into Fear completed principal photography, and Welles left the United States to begin shooting It’s All True, now under the aegis of Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs. This meant that he was out of the country for the Oscars ceremony. He received nominations in four categories: as producer, as director, as actor and as co-writer, along with Mankiewicz, who had decided to stay at home. Citizen Kane itself was nominated in nine categories.
Each announcement of the film’s name was greeted with hostility: boos, hisses, jeers. John Ford’s How Green was My Valley swept the board. Citizen Kane won in one category alone: screenplay. When the award was announced, Mankiewicz was cheered to the echo, drowning out Welles’s name. ‘Mank, where’s Mank,’ the cry went up. It has been computed that if the voting rules were the same then as they are now, Citizen Kane would have won the award for best film; for obscure reasons, the extras’ union voted conclusively against Welles (why? He had hired 796 of them on Kane). Notwithstanding, the mood at the ceremony was strongly against Welles. They had had enough of him, Welles the boy wonder, Welles the genius, Welles with an opinion about everything, Welles the cause célèbre, Welles the scourge of Hollywood, Welles the pundit, and now finally, Welles, director of the greatest film ever to come out of Hollywood.
Welles telegrammed Mankiewicz a high-spirited message from Rio: ‘heres what i wanted to wire you after the academy dinner colon you can kiss my half stop i dare to send it through the mails only now that i find it possible to enclose a readymade retort stop i don’t presume to write your jokes for you but you ought to like this colon dear orson colon you dont know your half from a whole in the ground stop affectionately orson’.24 Mankiewicz, indulging in a little esprit de l’escalier, had a joke of his own, the acceptance speech he never made: ‘i am very happy to accept this award in mr welles absence because the script was written in mr welles absence’.25
Orson Welles at fifteen
Left: Badger Brass, where Orson’s father Richard was treasurer and general secretary before turning to other pursuits
Right: Great-grandfather O.S. Head
Beatrice Welles
Richard Welles
Orson as a baby
Featuring in a newspaper story under the headline ‘Cartoonist, Actor, Poet – and Only 10’
Orson (left) with his older brother Richard Jr.
A school group at Todd. Welles is in the middle of the second row
The main building of the Todd School for Boys
From the 1936 Todd yearbook, ‘The seniors in their formal dinner clothes.’ Welles is in shorts
A souvenir fan from the Todd Theatre Festival
Todd headmaster Roger Hill with his wife Hortense and their daughter Joanne
Some of Orson’s artwork:
cover for a Todd catalogue;
headpiece for his column in the Todd News;
sketches in a letter to Roger Hill from Dublin
Taking a break during the Todd Theatre Festival in Woodstock: Welles and Hilton Edwards at edge of pool, Micheál MacLiammóir on diving board
Welles (right) as Claudius to MacLiammóir’s Hamlet at Woodstock
Photographed for a publicity release at the age of eighteen, Welles is described as ‘a young Chicagoan of amazing precocity’
Welles’s own drawing of the Gate Theatre in Dublin, where he launched his professional career
Orson Welles as Faustus in his produc
tion of the Marlowe play
‘Bride of Young Actor’ – Virginia Nicolson’s wedding picture as it appeared in a newspaper announcement
Orson, Virginia and their baby Christopher
Welles and John Houseman confer during a rehearsal of Horse Eats Hat
Joseph Cotten and horse in Horse Eats Hat, the first Project 891 production
Top right: A scene from Welles’s sensational production of Macbeth with an all-black cast
Left: Ouside the theatre on opening night and bottom right: backstage
As Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet
‘George Orson Welles: Shadow to Shakespeare’
Some of Welles’s costume sketches for Doctor Faustus and Macbeth
Page from Everybody’s Shakespeare with drawings by Welles
The man behind The War of the Worlds
Cartoonist Al Hirschfeld’s view of Welles at work