Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  Life catches him in the act of squirting ethyl chloride over another guest with Phil Reismann at the Copacabana Hotel. The accompanying photographs reveal a striking aspect of the phenomenon of Orson Welles, his extraordinary mutability. In one picture, he is a handsome, dashing, raffish young man; in another, he looks like a fat, mischievous, rather ugly youth; in yet another, the concentrated artist, willing his listeners to do his bidding. Perhaps it was his desire to control his image that led to the falling out with Life’s representatives, which Tom Pettey relayed to Herb Drake. Pettey was desperately trying to get the local press not to focus entirely on shots of Welles in nightclubs. There was a near-miss when he had arranged a press conference at which Welles had failed to make an appearance; eventually, though, he arrived and ‘came through nobly’.

  Yet another, particularly beady, pair of eyes was trained on Welles as he improvised his way through the Carnival shoot: those of Lynn Shores, the RKO production manager. He offers a view untouched by the euphoria of the journalists. ‘I am enclosing a sort of day-to-day report on this junket to date,’ he writes to his masters.18 ‘We have been shooting a certain amount of film during carnival, but I am afraid the results on the screen are not going to be terribly impressive from what I have seen so far.’ Here is one man, at any rate, who is in no danger of going native. ‘What with the heat, the strange food, our inability to get anything moving in the speedy American way, and’ – the nub – ‘the fast shuffles that Welles cooks up, everyone is pretty much at each other’s throats in our organisation down here. However, he can’t complain as we have given him everything we have.’ The problem, and it was an all-pervading one, was that in the aftermath of Carnival no one knew exactly what they were shooting. ‘As to the plans of this set-up, I am entirely in the dark. Harry Wild is also trying to get something out of Mr Welles. Each time Orson just shows him the cuff of his shirt.’ Clearly the team was not a team at all. A division was already evident. Dick Wilson, Shores complains, ‘sticks so close to Welles over at the beach that we are entirely without any information here at any time’. Welles’s natural resistance to any form of corporate control was only enhanced by his physical distance from the studio, and he now began an elaborate game of cat and mouse, which would last for the length of the shoot. ‘I get along swell with Orson and Reismann,’ Shores reports, ‘and in their saner moments we sometimes have a business-like conversation lasting at least a minute or so.’ Signing off, he drily notes, in a sardonic reference to the pious Catholic Joe Breen, RKO’s head of productions, that ‘conduct throughout has been up to the high standard Mr Breen hoped for’.

  Welles was now able to stand back a little after the whirlwind of Carnival and take stock of the film he was making or, more precisely, the film that was being made. ‘The problem of shooting carnival may be compared to the problem of shooting a storm,’ he wrote in his memorandum to RKO.19 ‘We shot without a script. We were forced to. A script was impossible. Even in those sequences in which it was possible to exercise directorial control, I as a director was always the one to be informed rather than the people working under me. In other words, I couldn’t tell them what to do. They had to tell me.’ This was an alarming experience for a man accustomed to being obeyed. He had as little idea as anyone else of the value or quality of what he had just shot, working as they all were ‘without the critical advantage of nightly sessions in projection and cutting rooms’. He defends the large quantity of footage shot. ‘Put it this way: we’ve had to take out all the paying dirt and ship it halfway round the world from the place where it was mined. We won’t get the gold till we go back to where operations are possible.’ This was his brief, he says (his italics): ‘It was understood by all concerned before I left that carnival would be shot on the cuff,’ but ‘none of us knew anything about it before we came here, nor were there any sources of information available’. Because, he says, the film he had been despatched to Brazil to make was to be ‘unrelieved by story (or what is generally considered story)’, their treatment of the Carnival subject of Brazilian music had to be ‘definitive, and beyond reproach. Above all, it had to be entertainment.’ Accordingly, in the midst of filming the pick-up shots from Carnival – and still with little more than a vague intuition about a unifying narrative – he set about investigating an entire culture. Thinking big was the only kind of thinking Welles knew. Largely at his own expense, under the direction of his friend the radical writer Robert Meltzer (a member of the Communist Party, and formerly Chaplin’s assistant on The Great Dictator), with input from his other Mercury colleagues, he assembled a remarkable team, including two of Brazil’s best newspapermen, Rio’s leading historian, and one of Brazil’s leading playwrights. Their task was to provide both an overview of Brazilian culture and a detailed analysis of its individual manifestations, especially in so far as they related to Carnival.

  Welles wrote Meltzer a memorandum that suggests the scope of his intellectual curiosity, but also the charismatic authority that he exercised over his colleagues, many of whom were older and rather better educated than he was. The memo is a rare example of Welles’s approach to film-making in action. He manifests a surprisingly detailed and almost academic interest in the origins of the different forms of samba – bateria, cuica, ganza, surdu, tamborim, pandeiro – issuing bossy demands for more and more information about origin, meaning and the future of Carnival:

  What made carnival what it was? Is it what it was? Make a full report of the element of competition in carnival … Brazil is a country of clubs.20 Samba is a manifestation of this national tendency. What are the social, economic and moral motives behind all this organisation? Does the old potency of Masonry relate to this? … all this requires absolute reams of written material to be composed by yourself now. Generalise, please, as little as you can. Particularise and specify as much as may be in this land of mas or menos. Above all, I beg of you don’t try to write well. Just notes.

  Welles’s instinctive prelapsarianism rightly suggests to him that ‘carnival began raucous … now it’s going commercial … if they don’t stop they’re going to turn it into Mardi Gras and the floats are going to end up as commercials’. Perhaps, he muses, the dilution of Carnival commenced with the emergence in Rio of a middle class, the granfinos. ‘Carnival,’ he says, ‘is a creation by somebodies and less than nobodies.’ His instincts as story-teller overcoming his socio-economic analyses lead him to urge Meltzer to make ‘Mr and Mrs Granfino and Mr and Mrs Malandro’ real as characters: ‘Surround them with their worlds – their entire worlds complete with props – sights and smells and sounds, and even a couple of ideas. Do this thoroughly as though you were writing a good novel, and carnival will be better defined than it has been.’ Unrelentingly, he demands engravings, lithographs, photographs and designs, which, like Napoleon returning from Egypt, he plans to take back to Hollywood with him. Once past the immediate intoxication of shooting the Carnival itself, he is beginning to edge towards a new sort of film: an anthropological, cultural, historical, musical, comical survey of a whole country. ‘The picture progresses,’ he ends. ‘Everything is just as it ought to be and our subject is more perfect than I hoped. You are all I need – you and a woman – I need you both.’

  Who would not follow such a man to the ends of the earth? This letter reveals the full force of Welles’s exploding mind and the overpowering immediacy of his personal engagement with individuals. As Geraldine Fitzgerald said of him, ‘he was like a lighthouse. When you were caught in the beam it was utterly dazzling. When the beam moved on, you were plunged into darkness.’21 Driven on by the need to articulate the substance of the film they wanted to make, Meltzer’s little unit produced a plethora of learned, colourful and often witty papers on, among many themes, Brazilian legends and folklore, ‘how different races and peoples contributed to carnival’ and ‘the whys of Rio’s carnival’. It is worth quoting some of the contributions, offering as they do a strong indication of what Welles’s film might have dealt with. �
��The humiliated, the timid, the unsatisfied constitute the majority of this crowd of badly-mixed races that dances, sings, yells and drinks and shows costumes of violent colours, in a mad search for dizziness and vertigo,’ writes Rui Costa in his exuberant essay about Carnival.22 ‘It’s the Negro that can’t be a white man, the woman still waiting for her great love affair, the poor that can’t be a maharajah – and he brings on his head a cheap imitation of a turban.’

  Professor Ghiaroni, in a paper entitled ‘Carnival and Respectable Gentlemen’, describes the Gafieira (‘the cheap public ballroom where people with little means and great desire for fun find all the consolation they need for their hard work’), underlining its socially levelling aspect: ‘In Rio the customers are a mixed-up throng of white, blacks and half-breeds. But there is always a predominance of the latter, so that white men, even those on the same economic and social level, are looked upon with little sympathy. At the carnival, all these psychological boundaries fall and everybody puts hands on the shoulders of everybody else, thanks to carnival’s roaring enlargement of the freedom idea, rather unsure during the rest of the year.’ Someone else anatomises the chôro, the classic Brazilian instrumental form; others, in great detail, analyse the samba. Meltzer himself writes a piece for this running symposium that he drolly calls ‘The Genealogy of Samba and Other Aspects of an Unquiet Life’; it is entirely characteristic of the Mercurians’ jokey manner with each other: ‘Since it’s very probably true that nothing comes from nothing, you can say right to begin with that Samba must have had specific origins in time and space … it has a pedigree, ancestry, roots. The problem is to find out what the hell they are, exactly. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any single authority competent to give this information in one-two-three form.’ His method, for all its playfulness, is essentially dialectical; he was, after all, a well-trained Marxist:

  Whether or not an article or a book on Samba would be necessarily true in all its details, it would at least make enough of a stir to serve as a focal point for a real clash between the various claims and theories. In the absence of such a focal point, it’s necessary to create one if you want to find out anything. One way to do this is the way you outlined: see as many people as will respond, ask as many questions as possible, and stir up a maximum of contradiction. Since no two people agree entirely, this is comparatively easy. After a while … you find yourself with a residue which might be called The Truth about Samba.

  An anonymous piece on the samba schools, the escolas, suggests a more passionate view: ‘The rivalry of different schools has its roots in old Portuguese dances, in which Moors and Christians sparred … to obtain … victory, the poor washerwoman or cook gets herself into debt for the whole year … the samba school is a world for psychologists: the father, who drivels with joy at seeing his daughter half-dressed in front of the floats; the jealous sweetheart who takes shots at anyone who makes a remark to the leader of the cordão; the mother who works day and night on her daughter’s fancy dress so that she can shine in the ballrooms of the “United Heart”.’

  The idea of the samba begins to pervade all the discussions. Phil Reismann, in a letter to Jock Whitney immediately after the shooting of Carnival had ended, takes credit for pushing it to the fore. ‘[Welles] will carry a story through the carnival film and an idea which I gave him showing the birth of the Samba in the hills of Rio and carrying it right down through the carnival using this as a thread to tie up all of his action.’ On the face of it, this idea was perfectly within the terms of Welles’s brief. The specific remit of the I-AA’s Motion Picture Division was ‘to remove sources of irritation and misunderstanding in the US as when our motion pictures burlesque Central and South American characters’; Girl of the Rio and Cuban Love Song were particularly glaring examples of this. The Brazilian division had already made documentaries such as Americans All and Good Neighbor Family, but no Latin Americans had been involved in their production. The I-AA wanted a film that avoided the crude ethnic stereotypes, but nonetheless promoted a positive, ‘colourful’ image; if it helped to promote tourism, so much the better (the year before, 700 Americans had come to Rio for the Carnival, in ‘a swirling four day and four night bender of lights, noise, tinsel and music, that makes New Orleans Mardi Gras look like a meeting of the Modern Language Association’). The trade cut both ways: Latin America was an important market, now that a large part of the European one had for all practical purposes disappeared. The origins of the I-AA give a clue to its policy. Roosevelt had created its immediate predecessor, the revealingly named Office of Commercial and Cultural Relations with the Americas, after reading a paper on ‘Hemispheric Economic Policy’ from Nelson Rockefeller’s informal think-tank on Latin America, the so-called junta, created in the wake of the left-wing Mexican government’s expropriation of all foreign oil holdings in 1938. Rockefeller had become convinced during his travels on behalf of Standard Oil in Latin America (where he was dubbed ‘El Principe de Gasolina’) that instability in the region was a threat to his family’s oil holdings and that economic prosperity was the only effective means of protecting foreign investment. This form of ‘missionary capitalism’, in Darlene Rivas’s suggestive phrase, informed all the activities of what soon became known as the Office of Inter-American Affairs, whose declared aim was not to build up a large government organisation, but to handle as many activities as possible through private organisations – hence the initial approach to RKO to make the propaganda film they wanted. It was a delicate mission, which Welles, now that he was fully intellectually and artistically engaged, was about to sabotage.

  Phil Reismann’s letter to Whitney reported that ‘the important and welcome surprise to me is Welles’s frame of mind, his willingness to forget that he is a motion picture producer alone, and that he has an important mission to perform’. Welles unquestionably believed that, but Reismann’s suggestion of the history of the samba itself as a possible spine for the Carnival section of the movie (if it was his suggestion) opened up innumerable avenues of interest to Welles, who sensed an opportunity to do something revolutionary, striking a blow for popular culture at the same time as creating a new kind of film, far beyond the scope of the ramshackle compendium he had originally talked about in Hollywood, and way beyond the travelogue envisioned by Harry Hopkins. To focus on the samba’s origins in Rio’s favelas, the shanty towns with their largely black population huddled together on the hillside in apparent squalor just beyond the smart centre of President Getúlio Vargas’s capital city with its aspirations to Parisian elegance, would inevitably involve an exploration not only of the city’s underbelly, but also of its African element. Neither the Office of Inter-American Affairs nor the Brazilian government was in the least interested in any such exploration. But Welles was compulsively drawn to this other Rio, where he was more and more often to be found, visiting the escolas de Samba, dabbling with the musical instruments, hanging out with the players, far from the posh salons of the cultural attachés; he gave in to the Cheapside part of his nature, his somewhat romanticised sense of a life without constraints or obligations, which seemed to him more real than the bourgeois world from which he came. As always, popular music enchanted and transported him. He was understandably greeted with open arms by the favelistas, ignored and despised as they were by the middle classes, who were somewhat embarrassed by their existence. ‘To give you some idea of Welles’s popularity,’ wrote Reismann, ‘he seems to be especially great with the masses; he has mingled with them and danced with them, and wherever we go in the car, the children yell out his name and applaud.’ In making the film, it was to these people that he felt his principal loyalty – to them and to those popular heroes, the boatmen, who had travelled on their jangadas from their home in the far north of Brazil’s vast domain to deliver to the President himself their petition, and whose story the government was so keen to have told. Increasingly, that modern Homeric epic began to assume equal narrative importance in Welles’s mind to the Carnival and the
history of the samba.

  The government of Getúlio Vargas was a highly significant factor in the situation with which Welles was dealing. On the face of it, this remarkable and somewhat paradoxical figure would scarcely seem likely to feature on a list of Welles’s political heroes: President since 1930, when he had been imposed by the army, he governed by decree, until four years later the Constituent Assembly, under the army’s influence, officially increased his formal powers. In 1937 Vargas had used the excuse of an imaginary communist uprising to declare a state of siege, imposing a new constitution, declaring in Brazil what he called Estado nôvo – the new state – which was essentially a totalitarian corporate state, heavily centralised, rigidly policed, highly undemocratic. Nonetheless, he was the most popular leader the country had known since the reign of Pedro II in the previous century. Champion of the urban middle and lower classes, he stood against the hitherto all-powerful coffee barons and their rural, semi-feudal empires. Before the creation of the Estado nôvo, he had endeared himself to his countrymen and women by instituting the secret ballot, vastly expanding the electorate (giving women the vote for the first time), enacting substantial social-security legislation, establishing a minimum wage and initiating a vigorous programme of industrialisation; he remained on good terms with the labour movement even after 1937, though political unrest was widespread.