Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  Some of Welles’s most fervent supporters are those who came to know him in later life; the directors Peter Bogdanovich and Henry Jaglom and the cinematographer Gary Graver are among the most notable of these. To them, Welles was mellow, wry and wise, viewing the events of his life and career from a lofty position of irony, amused at the follies of the world. It is entirely understandable that, having fallen under the irresistible spell of this Orson Welles, they should wish to fight his corner, propagating his interpretation of what happened to him. But neither they nor he had troubled to look at the actual record, which is freely available to scrutiny in the Lilly Library of the University of Indiana in Bloomington and in a number of individual archives spread across the libraries of America. Perhaps the most revealing source of all is the RKO archive, wherein are to be found not only Welles’s letters, telegrams and memoranda, but those of everyone else, both from the studio and from the Mercury offices, who was involved in the breakdown of Welles’s Unit within RKO: executives, press representatives, production managers, writers, cameramen, secretaries, friends, enemies and those who crossed from one camp to the other. Particularly in the case of Welles’s great lost film, It’s All True, the record amounts to an account of almost Proustian detail, offering a picture of Welles at work and at play, inspired and indulgent, deeply sensitive and grossly indifferent, mature and infantile, admired and despised, which provokes both admiration and compassion for a man in the grip of a temperament that was often fundamentally at war with his gifts.

  It is, above all, a very human record. In this, it will not please the other faction of Orsonolators, the army of theoretical academics who have moved in on him like locusts, seeing rich pickings in that very substantial body. For them he is a cornucopia, a gift from heaven; nothing that he did is less than profound from a phenomenological perspective. Whole conferences discuss his every filmed frame: their debates are polysemous, polyvalent, polymorphous, above all polysyllabic, although ‘debate’ is hardly the word for such one-sided activity. Fastidiously, they refuse to attribute value, to assess worth; or rather, they see equal value and equal worth everywhere, converting everything into their hermetic formulas. Welles would have found their activities incomprehensible and intolerable; he told Peter Bogdanovich that ‘everyone under thirty-five has gone to film school and they’ve learned this terrible lingo. They don’t think, just repeat these terrible little slogans.’ That was in the early nineteen-sixties. He was lucky enough not to live to witness the crimes against intelligibility committed in his name. ‘By enlarging the field of causal explanation beyond the studio career of Orson Welles (a sort of “zoom-out” and “rack focus” of historical procedure),’ writes one prominent Welles scholar:1

  I have tried to show how the impossibility of a single filmic representation can serve as a refractory surface against which a series of analogies, paradigmatic shifts, and disarticulations located within distinct yet convergent planes of historical actualisation come into view. It is in turn, across the strata of this unstable causal field (the discontinuities of which have been reconciled or reduced within the binary logic of the dominant supratext) that the reconstitution of the various ontogenetic stages of It’s All True (planning, production, dispersion) can be sketched.

  The author of this remarkable passage, which, as far as I am aware, has not yet been translated into English, is a serious researcher who no doubt has much to tell us about Orson Welles, but we will never know what it is. The same author, Catherine Benamou – who, it must be stressed, has read wider and deeper than anyone alive into the It’s All True material – justifies Welles’s fanciful claim to have appeared as an extra in Robert Flaherty’s film Man of Aran during his Irish sojourn in 1931 with the remarkable phrase: ‘what matters is the homage Welles rendered to Flaherty in this claim, not its “truth”.’2 In the Lewis Carroll world of the structuralists, of course, there is no such thing as truth: there is merely ‘truth’.

  My view is different. It seems to me that there is a plain, if many-layered, truth to be told. Orson Welles was a real man, if an exceptional one, confronting real and recognisable problems, making real and very human mistakes with real consequences. He sought to make his way in a world that often failed to accommodate his temperament; for the most part he refused to accommodate the world. He therefore needed to make a world of his own, a context in which he could flourish. His personality, like that of most human beings, was complex and often contradictory, but, unlike most human beings, he pushed these contradictions to such extremes that it sometimes seems that he had no centre at all. It sometimes seemed that way to him, and he sought many antidotes to eliminate the sense of a vacuum at the core; the most frequently deployed of these antidotes was the most effective of all, more reliable than alcohol, food, sex or love: work. He never ceased to want to tell stories in ever newer ways. There is a widely held view that Welles was self-destructive. A recent writer has suggested that what he said about John Barrymore was in fact autobiographical: after the supreme performance Barrymore gave at the dress rehearsal of his first Hamlet, ‘the rest of his life,’ says Welles, ‘was anti-climax’:

  There wasn’t anything left to do except go on imitating, as accurately as possible, that one great evening … the truth is that after that dress rehearsal, Jack began to fear that he couldn’t do anything else as good again. I think he was afraid to find out for certain, so he set about destroying himself, as publicly and as entertainingly as possible … he used to tell me that he hated theatre. But he couldn’t kid either one of us. We spent hundreds of hours together, planning the production of a dozen plays. And I began to guess that what he hated was the responsibility of his own genius. Jack wanted to keep it a secret from both of us.

  To apply this to Welles is sheer romanticism. Citizen Kane is not perfect; Welles did not feel daunted by it. Unlike Barrymore, he was driven by a desire to transform the medium in which he worked, both in terms of its form and its content. His ‘incomparable bravura personality’, as Kenneth Tynan described it, was often a burden to him; it is no accident that amnesia features so strongly in his output.3 But at core he was an artist; the problem was to find the way in which he could be true to his own art. That search was to occupy him for the rest of his life, a never-ending quest to tell the stories he wanted to tell in the way he wanted to tell them. In doing so, he left an astonishing corpus of work, some of it successful, some not, but all of it vital. If you attempt a different genre with each venture, you will not always master it. Citizen Kane was sui generis, a form of which Welles was of course the undisputed and never successfully imitated master. In seeking new forms he was not avoiding responsibility to his own genius: he was trying to find out what precisely it was, and to fulfil it as best he could. This is, it seems to me, a tale of heroism, not of self-destruction, and it will occupy the third and final volume of this Life.

  In this volume, as in the previous one, I have focused on why and how Welles made his films, and why they turned out the way they did. I have not attempted frame-by-frame analyses of the work, an enterprise which has been superbly undertaken elsewhere.

  It remains for me to thank those whose unstinting generosity and input have so richly fed the present volume: Charles Higham, Richard France, James Naremore, Robert Fischer-Ettel, Kent Hägglund, René Hagenhauer, Alcides da Costa. I am deeply indebted, too, to the work of the Wellesian scholars: the endlessly perceptive Jonathan Rosenbaum, and the quite phenomenally industrious Bret Wood; a fuller list of individual acknowledgements will be found at the end of the book. During the fifteen years since I started work on Welles, so many of those who not merely helped but also befriended me have disappeared from our lives; I think especially of George Fanto, Welles’s cameraman on It’s All True (and Othello), and Dick Wilson, who was pretty well the first witness I cross-examined and whose generosity not only to me, but also to Welles’s posterity in preserving the Mercury archive, is memorialised elsewhere in this volume. Beyond his great gifts as a film-maker,
Welles was a phenomenon, a remarkable member of the human race, and I have been especially grateful for the testimony of those who made him more vivid as a man. I hope I have been able to do justice to what I have been told.

  Simon Callow

  London, 2005

  For the paperback edition, I have incorporated a number of factual corrections furnished me by my friends and colleagues Kent Hägglund, Charles Higham, Miles Kreuger, Sam Leiter and François Thomas. My deep gratitude to each of these gentlemen for sharing the fruits of their long years of immersion in Welles’s life and work; the precision and generosity of their contributions means that the present edition owes even more to their work than the first one did. One or two reviewers of the book also made useful suggestions which I have gratefully incorporated, though I was amused to note that many of them thought that the punning chapter titles were my own invention: it may be worth noting that they all derive from contemporary articles on Welles, who seemed to inspire journalists to uncommon heights of playfulness.

  Simon Callow

  London, 2007

  Part One

  TARZAN TRIUMPHS

  CHAPTER ONE

  Orson Ascendant

  THE LOS ANGELES premiere of Citizen Kane on 2 May 1941 was one of the greatest and most brilliant occasions Hollywood had ever mounted: a celebration of cinematic audacity, a slap in the face for William Randolph Hearst and his cohorts in the press and within the industry who had sought to suppress the film, and a very public vindication of RKO’s controversial championship of Orson Welles. The film’s not quite twenty-six-year-old director-writer-producer-star had, it seemed, confounded his critics and laid down a marker for what would surely be a spectacular career in motion pictures.

  As it happens, Welles would never again know anything remotely like the premiere of Citizen Kane, nor ever again direct a film like it. Indeed, no film of his ever again had a premiere, even on the most modest scale. Kane proved to be the end of a chapter, not the beginning of one, though Welles would have been forgiven for not knowing so at the time. Just before the film’s release there had been a black few months when it seemed that it might never be seen – might indeed be physically destroyed – a prospect that drove him back, filled with rage against Hollywood, to the theatre, where he staged the most radical play he ever directed, Native Son; and to radio, where he wrote, directed and performed the most politically provocative programme he ever produced, His Honor the Mayor. But in May 1941, he appeared poised to resume his self-appointed task of transforming the movie industry. The reviews for Citizen Kane had almost unanimously acclaimed him as the most original, the most intelligent, the most important film-maker of the day – perhaps of all time. Such big talk is always dangerous to the recipient, particularly when (as all too soon proved the case) the acclaim is not matched by box-office performance. But for the time being, as far as Welles knew, his situation could scarcely have been better; he and his Mercury unit within RKO were raring to go, smiled on by company president George J. Schaefer, who had, at a shaky moment in the company’s fortunes, risked everything in backing Kane against powerful and ruthless forces, and who now felt triumphantly vindicated.

  The film’s critical success was a much-needed boost for Schaefer, who was determined, against the advice of the hard-headed businessmen who had hired him in 1938, to make RKO Hollywood’s artistic leader. With some imagination, he had contracted, albeit with notably less generous deals than Welles’s, outstanding talents like Pare Lorentz, the sturdily original director of the documentary The Plow that Broke the Plains, and Jed Harris, Broadway’s most admired (and most feared) director. From the start, Schaefer’s artistically ambitious policy had surprised and alarmed his board, but he had convinced them of the efficacy of his business plan, founded on the establishment of independent units within the RKO fold. Schaefer’s background was in sales, and sales is what RKO expected. At Paramount, he had driven his team, as Betty Lasky put it, ‘like a Prussian riding master’; at United Artists, where he had been before his RKO appointment, he was known as ‘The Tiger’.1

  In his dealings with distributors and the press over Citizen Kane, Schaefer had certainly justified that sobriquet, displaying the fierce tenacity of an animal protecting its young. In his personal dealings with Orson Welles, however, it was the reverse: he had become, to the astonishment of his colleagues, a doting parent. The tiger turned pussycat. His sponsorship of the twenty-six-year-old still known, more or less ironically, as the Boy Wonder had been a personal gamble, incurring many enmities and not a little ridicule. Welles as head of Mercury Productions dealt directly with Schaefer and was answerable only to him. From Welles’s point of view, this relationship with an older man, like so many in Welles’s early life, was of a curious intensity, emotional and tender: boyishly trusting, vulnerable, sometimes hot-headed on his part; protective, solicitous, occasionally strict on Schaefer’s. This ‘big, robust bulldog’ of a man (Lasky’s phrase; obviously he made a powerful, if zoologically complex, impact on his beholders) vied with Welles’s former headmaster ‘Skipper’ Hill and his official guardian Dr Maurice Bernstein in absolute and very public devotion to him and his talent.2 ‘Thank you Orson Welles!’ read Schaefer’s unprecedented personal message in the colour supplement of the Hollywood Reporter at the time of Kane’s release. ‘Your triumph is one of the greatest 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.’3 In the light of such unqualified and highly visible support, why would Welles, as he contemplated his next moves, not have expected absolute support from Schaefer in whatever he chose to do? And he was not wrong. What he misjudged was the strength of the older man’s position.

  Despite the noisy acclaim for Citizen Kane, Schaefer, in May 1941, was particularly vulnerable. Those he had personally appointed to crucial positions – the heads of programming and of studio – had failed to deliver the results he needed: their activities in 1939–40 left the company $1.25m in the red. In February of 1941, Schaefer had personally taken charge of the whole studio, a decision that led to widespread firings and walk-outs. ‘I just had a hot tip,’ quipped Garson Kanin, directing the current Ginger Rogers vehicle for the studio, ‘that R is pulling out, leaving the company only the KO.’4 There were vigorously denied rumours that Joseph Kennedy, recently relieved of his controversial position as ambassador to Britain, might be called in to mount an investigation of the company’s corporate structure, possibly even to take it over; maybe, it was suggested, he had an option to acquire a major slice of the company’s stock. The independent production units – ‘top-bracket specialists’ – of which Welles’s Mercury unit was one (and a very expensive one at that) were failing; while even critical successes like William Dieterle’s All That Money Can Buy had done poor business. In April of 1941, while Kane was still in limbo, Schaefer had signed a deal with the most dynamic of the independent producers, Sam Goldwyn; the deal brought prestige, but was scarcely going to produce any financial windfalls. In renegotiating Welles’s contract, Schaefer had offered him the same generous financial terms as before, but with one highly significant omission: Welles no longer had absolute approval of the final cut. He was also informally given to understand that budgets were to be very tight.

  Later that summer, against this financial background, and shortly after Kane’s rip-roaring premiere, Schaefer unveiled a new team. It was a surprising one. As head of production, he appointed Joseph Breen, the fiercely Roman Catholic former director of the industry’s morality watchdog, the so-called Hays Code Administration Office; while head of ‘A’ pictures was Sol Lesser, who will inevitably go down in history as producer of the Tarzan series rather than as the organiser of several valiant, if controversial, attempts at salvaging Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein’s abandoned American masterpiece, Que Viva Mexico! In July, Breen gave his first press conference to announce the new programme. He made a point b
oth of confirming Welles’s importance to the company – ‘the Wizard of RKO’, Breen called him – and at the same time suggesting a new direction for his work: his new three-picture deal would include ‘a Mexican picture’ and another, unnamed, ‘which will not follow the pattern of shocking Hollywood’.5 Finally, said Breen, there was the possibility of a film of Eric Ambler’s highly successful bestseller Journey into Fear. Despite the ringing endorsement, it was a slightly foggy announcement, which failed to offer a satisfactory answer to the pressing question: whither Welles?

  Welles and Schaefer both knew that the success of Citizen Kane had been a close-run thing. The quest to determine what to follow it with would be every bit as urgent and as full of anxiety as it had been in the desperate two years after Welles’s arrival in Hollywood and his discovery in Herman Mankiewicz of an ideal collaborator. Both Welles and Schaefer were sharply aware that they needed to succeed Kane with something different: they were not going to follow ‘the pattern of shocking Hollywood’. Both of them had been taken aback by the virulence of Hearst’s response to the film that he insisted was his portrait. Not only had the studio bosses been threatened with exposure by Hearst’s hit-woman, Louella Parsons, but so (far more dangerously from Schaefer’s point of view) had majority shareholders of RKO. Parsons had threatened Nelson Rockefeller, art-loving head of Standard Oil, and an early and enthusiastic supporter of Schaefer’s recruitment of Welles, with exposing supposed dirt on his father, John D. Rockefeller, Junior; David Sarnoff, head of RCA, a co-founder of RKO, had been similarly menaced. It had been an ugly and frightening experience, one that Welles was intent on not repeating. For all his radicalism, and his pleasure in cocking a snook at vested interests, Welles had no desire to destroy his future. Nor did he wish to be typecast as a controversialist. He was determined not to be confined to one persona, one genre, or one career. With the harrowing and health-wrecking period in limbo before the release of Citizen Kane behind him, his sense of illimitability had returned in full force. He was ready to reinvent himself.