by Simon Callow
In fact, the Carnival, even the account of the origins of the samba, was beginning to seem very small beer next to the heroic story of the jangadeiros, which had a particular advantage over the Carnival material: it was a reconstruction of an event that had already happened, and was therefore available to interpretation, reinvention and control. Documentary was a medium of which Welles had still not quite got the hang; this was drama. Even with the jangadeiros material, he was uncertain as to what he wanted to do with it until he had gone north, though he now had a title for it, which gave an immediate sense of the epically simple manner he proposed for the sequence: Four Men on a Raft. He was sure of one thing: the film must be shot in Technicolor. An increasingly frantic George Schaefer was equally sure that it must not: the expense would be prohibitive, to say nothing of the logistical problems of transporting a Technicolor crew to the north. He cabled Phil Reismann to that effect: MOST IMPORTANT THIS BE THOROUGHLY UNDERSTOOD BY WELLES AND YOURSELF. YOU CAN SHOW THIS CABLE TO WELLES. PLEASE EXPLAIN TO HIM THAT BECAUSE OF CERTAIN BOARD AND GOVERNMENT RESTRICTIONS I HAVE NO ALTERNATIVE.11 Reismann replied with an emollient and cleverly calculated letter, assuring Schaefer that the cost of shooting the rest of the Carnival picture would not go much beyond the salaries of crew and the very nominal studio rental; even Shores admitted that filming had been cheap: ‘money really does go a long way down here’. The whole movie to date, claimed Reismann, had cost a mere $19,000. Welles insisted, Reismann added, that the jangadeiros story was always part of the theme (which was true enough) and that Hollywood always knew it was going to be in Technicolor (which was not); without the jangadeiros, the Carnival story would not be much more than newspaper coverage.
What was undeniable was that the unit was sinking into despair. Welles was planning broadcasts, waiting for a sponsor to materialise. He spoke constantly about a tour of South America, and personal appearances with The Magnificent Ambersons in (among other places) Peru, which no doubt he saw himself conquering effortlessly. ‘It is all very grand and exciting,’ grumbled Shores, ‘but everyone is feeling pretty low thinking of the monotony of the months that are to follow here with little accomplishment in the way of direct picture progress.’12 Tom Pettey was no more cheerful. ‘The weather remains quite cloudy, the boat remains unreported, the studio we are to rent remains unoccupied, most of the time the cameras are idle,’ he told Herb Drake.13 ‘Actually we’ve done remarkably little toward making a picture since the close of carnival … as for the picture we are trying to make, only Orson and God knows anything about it and neither are in town at this writing. So many difficulties to overcome. Most of all we lack aggressive leadership.’
The leader himself and his inner circle had flown to Fortaleza, capital of the state of Ceará, the wind-swept home of the jangadeiros, with its limitless succession of beaches and its quiet colonial elegance, now quite disappeared, but which, in 1942, made the town a particularly charming contrast to Rio’s metropolitan swagger. Despite the restaurants, the ballroom and the Tiffany-decorated interiors and grand façade of the Teatro José de Alencar, the heart of the city remained its fishing trade, symbolised by the great pillar surmounted by a monumental statue of Christ blessing the fishermen, erected in 1922 in the city centre. The jangada – a primitive raft as old as the Phoenician barques it so strongly resembles, invented by the Indians, whose blood flows in the veins of so many of the inhabitants of the north-east – was at the core of the subsistence economy that sustained 80 per cent of the population. In the five days of their voyage, Welles and his team travelled 4,000 miles across Brazil, visiting Natal, San Luise, Bahia and other cities once thought to be, according to Tom Pettey’s excited report, LOST JUNGLES.14 In Fortaleza (where he was accompanied by Bob Meltzer and Augusta Weissberger, who kept a diary), Welles took part in a jangada race during which a fisherman was seriously injured, giving him a keen sense of the dangers the jangadeiros had courted in their heroic journey to Rio. He found, here in the north-east, a life and a people very different from the heterodox, multiracial, cynical, occasionally sleazy Cariocas; Fortaleza was tougher and simpler, an outdoor world, and it powerfully appealed to that aspect of Welles – every bit as powerful in him as the goût de la boue, which had been so generously indulged in Rio – that relished and honoured the life of working communities in direct contact with nature, governed by strictly regulated codes of behaviour. He had been moved in the same way by the fishing communities he had seen in the west of Ireland as a schoolboy traveller, and only a little later by the Berbers in the Atlas Mountains and the bull-fighters of Andalusia. They were, mutatis mutandis, yet other versions of the Merrie England that so haunted him: the Edenic paradises where, in Welles’s dream, decency, dignity and a franker, truer understanding of human nature prevailed.
Contact with the fishermen had a revivifying effect on him. Tom Pettey reported Welles’s enthusiasm, wiring Herb Drake that the jangadeiros were the MOST COLORFUL ADVENTUROUS TRULY BRAZILIAN PEOPLE HE’S SEEN.15 With some flourish, Welles brought back Jacaré and the other three jangadeiros with him to Rio, installing them in the Copacabana, the most famous and expensive hotel in the whole of South America, to thrash out the script of Four Men on a Raft. Welles and the fishermen bonded fiercely, their admiration for his capacity for Scotch whisky knowing no bounds. Welles himself, according to Pettey, looked BETTER THINNER HEALTHIER ANYTIME SINCE WE LEFT HOME. The day after their arrival, he sketched out his first ideas for the sequence. It starts with Welles talking direct to camera: ‘Beautiful shots Rio, and I start kind of travelogue, looks like going to be boring and I say a few words, lush expensive music, Copacabana crowds of bathing girls and suddenly close shot of couple girls under umbrella looking out at water …’16 He describes the triumphant arrival of the jangadeiros, their reception by President Vargas and their immersion in the Carnival. The camera follows the fishermen: ‘one of them turns to camera – OW picks up story – fade to village. Tell about Dragon of the Sea and whole life – return to Rio – petition – they excuse themselves – want to go to carnival – last shots of morning after.’ The sense of actuality, of reportage – all to be reconstructed, of course – plus the direct address to camera, represent a glimpse of the sort of photo-essay Welles was to develop in later years. This off-the-cuff preliminary sketch, dictated at high speed, was clearly intended as the roughest of outlines for his restive crew; on it Lynn Shores has laconically written: ‘this is the original script for me to plan the picture Four in a Boat’.
Welles remained convinced that the sequence needed to be shot in Technicolor, and larkily wired Phil Reismann, who was en route for Hollywood to persuade Schaefer of its importance; the tone is of one smart schoolboy to another. THAT THERE IS NOTHING IN THE WORLD I WON’T DO FOR GEORGE IS A SECRET IT IS SOMETIMES TEMPORARILY ADVISABLE TO WITHHOLD FROM HIM STOP THE TRULY HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF WHAT WE TOGETHER PROJECT FOR THE SOUTH AMERICAN CONTINENT IS A VISTA I LEAVE TO YOUR OWN GOOD SELF TO OPEN TO HIM STOP NEED I SAY THAT HIS OWN COURAGE AND FORESIGHT IN THIS MATTER ARE WORTH MENTIONING TO HIM AT THIS POINT STOP DON’T WORRY I AM PAYING FOR THIS TELEGRAM MYSELF.17 But Welles’s chum Reismann was already on his way back to Hollywood in more senses than one. Even before leaving, he had wired Schaefer that The Magnificent Ambersons could not be premiered in Buenos Aires because it would need Spanish subtitles, for which they would need the negative; they only had an answer print. That, he tells Schaefer, might give Welles the idea of going to the Argentine and shooting a picture there. This must have been part of the subject of their private conversations. Reismann urges Schaefer to wire Welles direct: THAT HE IS NOT TO MAKE ANY PICTURE IN ANY S AMERICAN COUNTRIES ON THIS STOP.18
Oblivious, Welles was still planning to record the Ambersons narration in Portuguese and Spanish: ‘Line up translators of real merit and see that we get a script for them,’ he wrote to Dick Wilson in a memo.19 ‘Later, speech experts, that they may devil me into understandability.’ Welles’s lack of urgency is remarkable, as if he felt that
everything – both in Hollywood and in Brazil – was essentially on course, and that things would sort themselves out in their own good time. He wants to finish a Walt Whitman recording started in Los Angeles; he writes thank-you letters; makes observations about the history of the samba and Bob Meltzer’s latest draft; is happy to ‘lecture anywhere and everywhere anyone says’. The critical situation in Rio is dealt with whimsically: ‘It is my intention,’ he writes to Wilson, ‘to report to you my own daily activities. Of yesterday it can truly be said that I dreamed largely and accomplished little … by way of criticism, I would like to suggest that it would have been strategic for you or Meltzer or both to have turned up, as Pettey did, at the airport this morning. I was there and spent the dog watches proceeding [sic: Welles’s charmingly wayward spelling] that solemn event filling Phil’s brain with those large dreams to which I have already made reference.’ Those large dreams (which Reismann was busily conveying to Schaefer) were now in the forefront of his mind, with the real world – the world of war, the world of movie politics – a vague backdrop. ‘Let nothing slip through our fingers. Fill every golden hour with something done. Do it now. Keep smiling. Obrigado. – Remember all our watchwords. Abide by them. And it must follow, as the night the day, that I will sleep till after lunch.’
Schaefer, desperate to try to control his favourite son of art, and to restore some sense of his own authority, wired Welles to ask him whether he could release Bob Meltzer from his duties: SURE YOU REALISE IMPORTANCE OF CURTAILING EXPENSES REGARDS. Welles replied with the usual soft soap: HASTEN ASSURE YOU MY ONLY POSSIBLE DESIRE HERE IS TO MAKE THIS BEST POSSIBLE PICTURE AT LOWEST POSSIBLE COST STOP HOPE YOU BELIEVE I WISH NOTHING MORE THAN TO BE FULLY CO-OPERATIVE IN EVERY RESPECT TO MAKE YOU PROUD OF ME MUCH LOVE.20 A couple of days later, on 18 March, Welles defended Meltzer again, indicating that overheads would be radically reduced once the Carnival reshoots were finished, and adding nonchalantly, almost as an afterthought: EAGER HEAR REACTIONS AMBERSONS PREVIEW LOVE ORSON WELLES.21 He would not be nonchalant again for some while – if ever.
CHAPTER SIX
Pomona
IN THE CAREER of Orson Welles, the name of Pomona, one of the smaller cities of Los Angeles County, rings horribly down the decades. It was here that RKO (breaking with their strategy for Citizen Kane, which had been widely but privately exposed to informed and influential individuals) decided to test The Magnificent Ambersons on an unsuspecting public. A less happy choice of venue could scarcely have been made, even from a symbolic point of view. Named after the Roman goddess of fruit, the city had rapidly outgrown its agricultural roots to become a major industrial conurbation – the very form of social existence that the novel (and the film) so eloquently deplores. In 1942, the city was a bustling and impatient place, vigorously expanding, home of a principal branch of the California State Polytechnic University, with a large young population, both indigenous and student; and it was from these that the film’s first audience was drawn. They had no idea what to expect: it was a sneak preview. They were delighted by the first half of the double bill on offer that night: The Fleet’s In, a musical from Paramount starring Eddie Bracken and Betty Hutton. ‘Gobs of glee!’ the posters would later proclaim, ‘A boatload of beauties! A shipload of songs!’ Among that shipload of songs were ‘Arthur Murray taught me dancing in a hurry’, ‘Conga from Honga’ and, topically, ‘Tomorrow you belong to Uncle Sam’. The gung-ho young audience had a further delight in store: James Cagney was to make a personal appearance at the end of the evening. In between was the small matter of The Magnificent Ambersons.
Welles had had exactly a day’s notice of the preview. Robert Wise wired on 16 March to inform him that George Schaefer had unexpectedly requested running Ambersons for himself and Charles Koerner and four other men unknown to him: PROBABLY EASTERN EXECUTIVES.1 Following the showing, Schaefer asked about the possibilities of reducing the length of the film. ‘He ordered me to prepare picture for sneak preview Tuesday nite with following cuts: both porch scenes and factory.’2 Wise did not say it, but there was no question about it: they had taken Welles’s film away from him. The long-drawn-out surgery that followed over the subsequent five months was simply a matter of degree. The principle was established: ‘they’ would do what ‘they’ thought was necessary; just for starters, three crucial scenes had been arbitrarily removed from the film without Welles’s consultation. Simply reading Wise’s wire makes one’s stomach tighten: it is every film-maker’s worst nightmare, one that in Welles’s case was to prove recurrent; indeed, he never really woke from it. The active hand of Charles W. Koerner is evident in this manoeuvre; George Schaefer was losing the power struggle. Apart from Koerner’s natural animus against Welles, the Mercury and everything they stood for, he had a mission: he believed that the double bill was the commercial answer to an executive’s prayer. It was no more than simple logic, therefore, that The Magnificent Ambersons must be reduced to an appropriate length, something just on either side of ninety minutes. The print that Wise showed to Koerner, Schaefer and the executives lasted 125 minutes; the one seen at Pomona was 110 minutes. The process of attrition had just begun.
Predictably, the boisterous preview audience, high on the Conga from Honga and its own hormones, viewed Welles’s film with bewilderment and boredom. It is impossible to believe that RKO’s motives in showing the film in this context were anything other than Machiavellian. Certainly the report cards perfectly duplicated Koerner’s general view of Welles’s work: the violence of the reaction is still somewhat shocking to read. ‘It should be shelved as it is a crime to take people’s well-earned money for such artistic trash as Mr Welles would have us think.3 There just isn’t room here to tell how disgusted everyone was. Mr Welles had better go back to radio I hope.’ ‘It stinks – too dark – too slow, and too mixed up.’ ‘Who cares about that junk.’ ‘It was putrid.’ ‘It was slow, morbid, and not exactly good entertainment for people in a world in the condition ours is in.’ ‘We do not need trouble pictures, especially now. Make pictures to make us forget, not remember.’ The lighting was greatly animadverted on: ‘Please have pity on our poor strained eyes.’ A number of the comments were addressed to ‘you producers’, perceived as a tyrannous clique forcing their highbrow tastes on the public, which is nicely ironic. ‘I don’t see why, in times of trouble, bloodshed and hate, movie producers have to add to it by making dreary pictures. I wish you producers could see how much more the audience enjoyed The Fleet’s In than The Magnificent Ambersons.’ As far as the acting performances were concerned, there was general admiration for Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter and Tim Holt, with little mention of Joseph Cotten or Agnes Moorhead. One report would have given particular satisfaction to the Koernerites: ‘It’s as bad if not worse than Citizen Kane.’ The few favourable responses also predicted commercial disaster for the film, which played into Koerner’s hands too: ‘This picture is magnificent. The direction, acting, photography, and special effects are the best the cinema has yet offered. It is unfortunate that the American public, as represented at this theatre, are unable to appreciate fine art. It might be, perhaps, criticised for being a little too long.’
Two days later, at the second preview in Pasadena, the film was 1,500 feet shorter. The reaction of the infinitely more sophisticated audience in that city of playhouses and museums was commensurately warmer: ‘Much better than Citizen Kane. Orson Welles is a genius.’4 ‘This preview cannot be praised too highly. Depressing but better than any propaganda picture.’ ‘Definitely 10 times better than Citizen Kane.’ ‘Orson Welles is the most tremendous director of the day. This is by far one of the finest pictures I have ever seen.’ Generally the reaction in Pasadena focused on Welles, for or against. It is notable how much personal feeling he provoked: ‘I do not like Orson Welles “running his shows”. He should “keep quiet”.’ ‘The G—d— thing stunk/only Orson Welles could think up a thing like that.’ There are more lighting comments, including, quite wittily: ‘The blackout d
oesn’t have to be observed on the screen. Turn on the lights!’ And then there are the sort of reports that would have pleased Welles: ‘The setting accurately portrayed the scenes of my own childhood and I saw some of my unlovely relatives.’ The Mercurians were all delighted, feeling vindicated; but Pomona could not be undone.
Two days after Pasadena, Schaefer wrote to Welles:
I did not want to cable you with respect to The Magnificent Ambersons as indicated in your cable of the 18th only because I wanted to write to you under confidential cover.5 Of course, when you ask me for my reaction, I know you want it straight, and though it is difficult to write to you this way, you should hear from me. Never in all my experience in the industry have I taken so much punishment or suffered as I did at the Pomona preview … they laughed at the wrong places, talked at the picture, kidded it, and did everything that you can possibly imagine. I don’t have to tell you how I suffered, especially in the realisation that we have over $1m tied up. It was just like getting one sock in the jaw after another for over two hours. The picture was too slow, heavy, and topped off with sombre music, never did register. It started off well, but it just went to pieces … I queried many of those present and they all seemed to feel that the party who made the picture was trying to be ‘arty’, was out for camera angles, lights and shadows, and as a matter of fact, one remarked that ‘the man who made that picture was camera crazy’.