Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  It is clear from the radio production that the subject was perilously close to Welles’s own heart and experience. The death scenes, in particular, are dwelt on with positively Victorian emotionalism; mortality was an uneffaceable component of Welles’s mental landscape, the deaths of both his parents – and especially, perhaps, that of his mother, when he was nine – branded on his consciousness. The sense of guilt and shame that so informed his early manhood no doubt contributed to his obvious identification with the character of the intolerably arrogant and selfish (if bewildered) George Amberson Minafer. There were other points of contact, too. In his imagination, the Welleses of Kenosha had been a family like the Ambersons; and indeed, the Gottfredsons, his paternal grandparents, had known a certain magnificence in their big, ugly mansion in Kenosha, though their wealth was scarcely on the scale of Tarkington’s heroes. Welles always claimed that his father had been Tarkington’s best friend, and that the character of Eugene Morgan (‘a mechanical genius’, according to the novel) was based on the happy-go-lucky, modestly inventive secretary of Badger Brass, but no evidence for this claim exists. Nor does it matter, one way or the other; what is significant is that Welles believed it to be true, and wanted it to be true, and his conception of Gene Morgan is certainly an idealised version of his father. The general tone of lament for a vanished Golden Age – for what he calls ‘the Merrie Englands’ – was from an early age central to Welles’s inner life; this feeling too was associated in his imagination with his father and with what Welles fondly recollected as a semi-feudal existence in the tiny Illinois retreat of Grand Detour, where Richard Welles for a while ran a hotel. The pull of the past was a mighty one for Welles, which partly accounts for the immense force of his thrust towards the future.

  Robert L. Carringer, in a celebrated, if somewhat tortuous, essay ‘Oedipus in Indianapolis’, makes an explicit autobiographical connection between Welles himself and George Amberson Minafer. There are certain trivial similarities that are quite striking – George, like Welles himself as a boy, is known as Georgie; at school, as with Welles at Todd, ‘they did not like him – he was too arrogant for that – but he kept them in such a state of emotion that they thought more about him than they did about all of the other [ten] pupils’. George has an overwhelmingly intense relationship with his mother, as did Welles, and endures a heart-rending death-bed scene, as did Welles. But all resemblances stop there. Beatrice was tough and demanding, refusing to indulge her son, to the point of watching with equanimity as he climbed out onto the ledge of a fifth-floor window to throw himself off rather than take his piano lessons. All Welles’s memories of her indicate a severity in her demeanour and an expectation, indeed an insistence, on her part that Welles would distinguish himself in her eyes. This is the precise opposite of the infinitely idolising indulgence, at whatever cost to herself, her health or her happiness, that the novel’s Isabel Minafer so doggedly displays towards her only son. No doubt there may have been some element of Oedipal outrage for the young Orson when Beatrice Welles began her affair with Maurice Bernstein, just as George Minafer reacts so traumatically when Eugene Morgan begins to court Isabel; but in Welles’s case it soon modified into something considerably more complex, as Dick Welles slipped away into alcoholic absence and Bernstein became the boy’s de facto parent.

  Carringer insists that Welles’s affectionate accounts of his father – ‘Dickensian caricatures’ – mask violent hostility towards him, and that what drove Welles was ‘a furious need to prove himself in the eyes of a man who was no longer there’. This is a surprising analysis. In an important sense Dick Welles, like. Wilbur Minafer, was no longer there long before his actual death; as with Wilbur, it was his death that gave him real significance. Welles was certainly deeply guilty about Dick Welles’s subsequent lonely, booze-sodden death after he had abandoned him at the behest of Skipper Hill and Dr Bernstein, but he hadn’t disappointed his father: his father had disappointed him, and Welles had rejected him in favour of Hill. In the short autobiographical sketch entitled ‘My Father Wore Spats’ published in Vogue towards the end of his life, Welles memorably states without further elaboration that he killed his father. Carringer dismisses this statement as melodramatic. Obviously it is not literally true, but it seems a clear indication that guilt (not revenge) was the fuel of Welles’s psyche, although it is certainly possible that the guilt bred a degree of resentment. The stories that he told about his father, and his conception of Eugene Morgan, amount to an idealised reinvention of a man who, good-humoured to a fault, had frittered away on booze and girls the large sum of money that had come to him by a combination of solid clerkship and good luck. (Interestingly enough, Dick Welles’s modest contribution to the progress of engineering science had been the development of a headlight, and in Tarkington’s novel, it is as a result of being unwisely invested in a company manufacturing headlights that the last dribble of the Ambersons’ fortune dries up.)

  Carringer also makes great play of the parallels to Hamlet in the central relationship of the novel, and marvels at the fact that Welles never took the central role in that play (though he had played both the Ghost and Claudius when he was, respectively, sixteen and seventeen, to Micheál macLiammóir’s Prince). Although Welles certainly airily mentioned that he should have left Hollywood after Citizen Kane and played Hamlet on Broadway, this can be nothing but shorthand for saying that he should have pursued a serious career as a classical stage actor. Of all great Shakespearean roles, Hamlet is the least suited to his particular gifts, physical and temperamental. The character’s mercurial thought processes, his indecisiveness and vulnerability, his neurotic sensibility, and above all his restless self-questioning, would have been very elusive for Welles, a natural King actor, as he said of himself, not a Prince actor at all. It is true that Tarkington draws attention to an aspect of Hamlet in the character of George Amberson Minafer; he has him, indeed, consciously – self-consciously – quoting the play. But his point is not that George identifies with Hamlet (as well he might), but that there is an element in his behaviour that is play-acted. After his first confrontation with his mother, he puts on his long black dressing-gown. He glimpses himself in the mirror. ‘Happening to catch sight in his pier glass of the picturesque and medieval figure thus presented, he paused to regard it; and something profoundly theatrical in his nature came to the surface. His lips moved; he whispered, half-aloud, some famous fragments: “’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,/Nor customary suits of solemn black” … no less like Hamlet did he feel and look as he sat gauntly at the dinner table with Fanny to partake of a meal throughout which neither spoke.’ The ‘something profoundly theatrical in his nature’ is a crucial insight into George’s behaviour: he is enacting a role – the role of a gentleman, as he understands it – as a purely cerebral imperative, in defence of a code that only he seems to recognise. Earlier, he has spoken of the importance of ‘being’ over ‘doing’; he sees himself as a kind of totem of his tribe, the living embodiment of its values. In so doing he cuts himself off from everything that sustains human life: love, work, the future. This, more than any centrally unresolved Sophoclean or Shakespearean conflict, is at the heart of George’s profoundly negative journey through life, until comeuppance teaches him sanity.

  It is worth dwelling on these matters, because The Magnificent Ambersons is a book that mattered greatly to Welles at many levels. The film that he made from it is a problem film, perhaps for that very reason, and Carringer is absolutely right to say that this is by no means only as a result of what the studio did to it before it was released. It is a measure of Welles’s complexity both as man and artist that he should decide not only to take on such charged and difficult material at such a critical moment in his own career, but simultaneously to work full out on two other films as different from it as can reasonably be imagined: a witty and radical political thriller and a wildly ambitious pan-American compendium film. Perhaps to focus on The Magnificent Ambersons to the exclusion o
f anything else would have been simply too disturbing, too painful. All of which may well explain why he chose not to appear in the film, although he liked to say that it was simply because he was too fat. Of equal significance, he knew that he would be speaking the narration, which would form such an important part of the film’s effect; and George Minafer could scarcely be the narrator. In fact, for George he cast an actor as different from himself as could be imagined, Tim Holt, noted for his appearances in cowboy films. Welles was certainly familiar with the actor’s work in at least one film, John Ford’s Stagecoach, which had been his celluloid bible in learning the rudiments of his craft as a film-maker; he claimed to have watched it more than a hundred times. He may also have seen him playing a spoiled rich boy in Gregory La Cava’s Fifth Avenue Girl of the same year. There is no question that Holt is the actor Welles wanted for the part: he was booked as soon as the project was given a start date; none of the Mercury regulars was even considered. Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that Holt was ‘extraordinary … one of the most interesting actors that’s ever been in American movies, and he decided to be just a cowboy actor’, which is a most generous view of the talents of a serviceable actor, the apogee of whose career was his appearance as Humphrey Bogart’s dogged, conscientious sidekick partner in John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1948.2 Disappointed by his experience of acting (perhaps understandably: his last film was The Monster that Changed the World), Holt retired from the profession at the age of forty until making an ill-judged comeback in This Stuff’ll Killya. But Welles clearly felt that he was the embodiment of his conception of George Minafer.

  It is doubtful whether Tarkington would have recognised him as such. At all times – even after his fall – George is described in terms of his exceptional elegance and nobility of bearing. ‘George’s imperious good looks were altogether manly, yet approached actual beauty as closely as a boy’s good looks should dare.’ He is ‘the magnificent youth’, his manners de haut en bas. When he comes home from university, ‘it was as if M. le Duc had returned from the gay life of the capital to show himself for a week among the loyal peasants belonging to the old château, and their quaint habits and costumes afforded him mild amusement’. At the celebrated ball in the Ambersons’ mansion, ‘it is to be doubted if anybody felt more illustrious or more negligently grand than George Amberson Minafer felt at this party’.

  There is nothing negligent, grand or magnificent about Tim Holt’s George: he is stocky, plebeian in manner, sulky and impetuous. In the Arthur William Brown illustrations to the original edition (which, as it happens, the artist sent to Welles during the preparations for the film), George appears almost as a young Basil Rathbone, soigné, unsmiling, impeccably elegant. This is not a quibble: in the novel, his appearance expresses everything that he stands for, his features frozen in the attitudes of his class. Even in the boarding house, when he and Fanny have to scrabble for their very subsistence, he insists on dressing for dinner. Tim Holt could never play this character, even if he were more versatile – and he was not versatile. He was essentially a one-performance actor, a performance with which Welles was very familiar. This must have been the way he wanted George portrayed. Perhaps he thought that a more patrician performance would have alienated the audience; or perhaps he thought that expressing the baffled, emotionally strangled soul of George Amberson Minafer was more important than realising his external characteristics. Either way, the whole sense of the story is changed by this decision: this is the point at which casting becomes narrative. At the centre of Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons is a pettish lout; at the centre of Tarkington’s is a gilded youth who seeks to arrest history.

  To cast the roles of George’s mother and his grandfather, Welles also stepped out of the fold of the Mercurians. In the pivotal role of Isabel Amberson, he cast Dolores Costello. Here sentimental factors governed his choice: she had been a great star of the silent movies, and she had once been married to Welles’s hero (and, latterly, friend) the once-great, now ruined, John Barrymore. Again, she was not quite Tarkington’s Isabel, and again, that is neither here nor there, except in so far as it affects the balance of the story. Isabel, the universally adored, is characterised throughout the novel for her uncanny youthfulness: as often as not, says Tarkington, she seems to be fourteen years old, vivacious and girlish. (Again, Brown’s illustrations are an interesting pointer: his Isabel looks more like George’s sister than his mother.) Costello, though only thirty-seven at the time, seems matronly and elegiac from the start, anticipating Isabel’s physical decline and making her relationship with both George and Eugene less vivid, less dangerous. The morbid tone starts early in the film; in the book, it only makes its appearance with Isabel’s illness and death.

  For the casting of Major Amberson, Welles again turned to the silent movies: Richard Bennett had been a considerable film star from the time of Damaged Goods (1914), though it was on the Chicago stage that Welles had first encountered him: ‘I’d been such a breathless fan of his in the theatre,’ he told Peter Bogdanovich.3 ‘He had the greatest lyric power of any actor I ever saw on the English speaking stage. There’s no way of describing the beauty of that man in the theatre.’ Welles might certainly have seen Bennett in Winterset in New York (his last stage performance); it is conceivable that he saw him in his greatest role, the title character in Andreyev’s expressionist fantasy He Who Gets Slapped, in which his performance was thought to be the culmination of romantic acting. Despite being the father of a famous trio of actresses (Joan, Constance and Barbara Bennett), his circumstances had declined to the point at which Welles had discovered him – he said – living alone in a Catalina boarding house. This, of course, was the stuff of theatre romance for Welles: his genuine and practical love of elderly performers was a constant in his life, and entirely reciprocal; they knew he was one of them. Bennett later wrote to him with affectionate esprit de corps in the parlance of his generation of theatre folk: ‘You have made me – happy – with sweet potentialities – I hope my meagre epistles have not bored you – they are only to remind you that you are still making people happy this side of the equator – Bless you, boy – RB.’4 In this piece of casting, Tarkington’s conception of the character and Welles’s are identical; Tarkington (no mean playwright himself) may well have seen Bennett’s work in the Chicago theatre; Bennett, like the author, was of good Hoosier stock.

  For Lucy, the object of George’s unwavering but perennially unrequited passion, Welles cast the eighteen-year-old Anne Baxter, who was perfectly able to realise the charm, intelligence and independence of the character. She may sometimes fail to go much beyond the limits of a conventionally high-spirited young woman of the period – Tarkington suggests something a little deeper – and is hard-pressed to convey the strength of her feelings for George, but one never questions her ability to provoke the love he feels for her, which is perhaps the more crucial matter. She very credibly creates the relationship with her father, who is played by that key figure in Welles’s life and that of the Mercury, Joseph Cotten, who was thirty-six, exactly ten years older than Welles, and probably ten years younger than Eugene Morgan. Casting Cotten in the role ensured that it would be sympathetically played; his easy Virginian charm and soft handsomeness, allied to his perfect deportment, ideally convey the elegance and restraint of Gene Morgan and the chivalrous romanticism of his tendresse for Isabel Minafer. His attempt to play a part ten years older than he was – always a very difficult transformation, much harder than playing extreme old age – would inevitably tend to create a slightly muted impression, and here he and Welles would start to part company with Tarkington, whose Eugene is a more forceful and more reckless character than Cotten would be able to suggest. Morgan has suffered two financial collapses already by the time he returns to his home town, ready to invest everything in a newfangled and widely suspected invention, the automobile. ‘There was something of the sixteenth-century buccaneer,’ Tarkington observes, ‘about Eugene Morgan’, but
that was not in Joseph Cotten’s repertory. George Minafer accuses him of being a businessman and Lucy ripostes that he is a genius. He must of course be both, an inspired entrepreneur who ends up as one of the wealthiest men of his era. He has not achieved this by charm alone: Cotten’s casting would make it seem as if he had, which somewhat diminishes the force of George’s intuitive reaction against him. Gene stands for everything that George rejects: doing is his natural mode; being is neither here nor there. The balance between Tim Holt and Joseph Cotten as actors is almost the reverse of Tarkington’s. Holt’s turbulent, slightly brutish energy makes his claims to epitomise the ideals of American aristocracy unconvincing, while Cotten’s natural relaxed amiability and languidness scarcely suggest the restless spirit of capitalist enterprise. Whether from filial piety or from a more general desire to create a sepia-tinted vision of the recent American past, Welles’s casting here again conspires to rob the narrative of some of its meaning and a great deal of its energy.

  Where the book and the casting are again triumphantly at one is in the role of Fanny Minafer, Isabel’s deeply disappointed sister-in-law. The character is Tarkington’s most compelling creation, self-defeating and desperate, at war with George, pathetic and sometimes malign in her attempts to deal with her hopeless passion for Eugene. Agnes Moorehead was perhaps the most remarkable of all the actors in the Mercury stable. Like many of the others, she had first worked with Welles on radio; as early as 1937 she had been in The Shadow, playing the long-suffering secretary Margot to his Lamont Cranston. She joined the Mercury Theatre on the Air the following year, appeared in the very first programme, Dracula, in the notorious War of the Worlds and, to startling effect, in Rebecca. In addition to the high spirits and technical skill of the other actors, she brought an extraordinary emotional depth and a transforming imagination to her work, which made each of her roles uniquely expressive; like the very greatest actors, she forged a mask that both liberated her and imprinted itself indelibly on the spectator’s mind. Welles took her to Hollywood with him, and in Citizen Kane cast her in the small role of the mother of the young Charles Foster Kane. Noting the terrifyingly intense determination she brought to the part, allied to and expressed by the American Primitive gauntness of her appearance – hair tautly swept back, cheeks lined, waist tightly nipped – he and Toland shot her in such a way as to give her work maximum impact: these brief scenes become the fulcrum of the film. Now, in The Magnificent Ambersons, he cast Moorehead in the part that would be the high point of her early career. There was in the actress a latent (and sometimes naked) neediness, a disappointment in herself and, especially, her physical appearance, that can often be the source of exceptional power. Her greatest admirers as directors – and the directors whom she most admired – were Orson Welles and Charles Laughton, and both of them had a particular protective affection for her beyond their respect for her work. On any consideration – in terms of age (thirty-six at the time of filming), physically, vocally, emotionally – Moorehead was perfectly placed to play Fanny Minafer.