Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  Pasadena did not change Schaefer’s opinion. It was ‘better; but not enough. The Pomona audience was young – it is the younger element who contribute the biggest part of the revenue. If you cannot satisfy that group, you just cannot bail yourself out with a $1m investment.’ Their initial discussions, he reminds Welles, were all about making low-cost movies – and here they are with two pictures having cost $2m. They won’t make a dollar on Citizen Kane and will probably not break even. ‘All of which reminds me of only one thing – that we must have a “heart to heart” talk. Orson Welles has got to do something commercial. We have got to get away from “arty” pictures and get back to earth. Educating the people is expensive, and your next picture must be made for the box-office.’ At least he was talking about a next picture. ‘God knows, you have all the talent and the ability for writing, producing, directing – everything in Citizen Kane and Ambersons confirms that. We should apply all that talent and effort in the right direction and make a picture on which “we can get well”. – That’s the story, Orson, and I feel very miserable to have to write you this. My very best as always. Sincerely yours.’

  This is a noble letter, written entirely in sorrow, not in the least in anger. But it is the letter of a beaten man, and a confused one. Schaefer, like Welles, believed that The People would lap up quality; now, the moment he meets rejection, his only concern is for the box office, for which the adolescents of Pomona are to be the arbiters. He approvingly quotes the amateur critic who accuses Welles of being ‘arty’ and ‘camera crazy’. He was, of course, running scared: the corporate dogs were yapping at his heels. Jack Moss had wired Welles after what he called the UNSATISFACTORY REACTION in Pomona;6 he attributed it to the audience’s youthfulness and impatience with the film’s length, but nonetheless, he insists, THEY WERE OVER AND OVER HELD BY THE DRAMA. Welles’s other colleagues were less inclined to spare him. Bob Wise wrote to him somewhat wearily, ‘You asked for a more detailed report of preview audience reactions and I have never tackled a more difficult chore.7 What I mean is it’s so damn hard to put on paper in cold type the many times you die through the showing – the too few moments you are repaid for all the blood and suffering that goes into a show. With God’s help and a sigh, here’s a rough breakdown of the previews.’ The audience, he says, were restless during the first three or four reels; there were few laughs until the second half of the snow scene: ‘The really important thing is the length of the film and the definite audience disinterest and inattention during all this.’ There was, too, growing resentment at ‘the hysterical sort of boy that George seems to be in these scenes’. In the scene of George reading Eugene’s letter to his mother, there was ‘not a laugh but a reaction that said: “Oh God here he is again.”’ On Welles’s final line, ‘That’s the end of the story,’ Wise reports that there was a round of applause ‘and what seemed to be a sigh of relief’. At both previews, many people walked out throughout the showing. ‘The picture,’ he says, in a striking phrase, ‘does seem to bear down on people.’ Nonetheless, he adds, ‘we are all certain that the basic quality of the show was appreciated and it is merely a matter of gentle, tireless and careful study and work to resolve The Magnificent Ambersons into a real proud Mercury production.’ The very things, in other words, that Welles wasn’t able or willing to give it; the very things he lavished on Citizen Kane in such profusion.

  Worse was to come. Welles had a professional respect for Wise, but Joseph Cotten was perhaps his closest friend, a core Mercurian, his second self. Cotten’s report suggested a general unease with the whole enterprise. Welles had written, he said, ‘doubtless the most faithful adaptation any book has ever had’, and when he finished reading it he had had the same reaction as when he read the book.8 ‘The picture on the screen seems to mean something else. It is filled with some deep though vague psychological significance that I think you never meant it to have. Dramatically, it is like a play full of wonderful strong second acts all coming down on the same curtain line, all proving the same tragic point. Then suddenly someone appears on the apron and says the play is over without there having been enacted a concluding third act.’ He reiterates Wise’s prescription: ‘It’s all there in my opinion, with some transpositions, revisions and some points made clearer.’ He thinks that Welles doesn’t realise that he’s made ‘a dark sort of movie. It’s more Chekhov than Tarkington.’ The situation was clearly absolute hell for everyone involved. All who had seen the film knew that something was wrong, and were unable in conscience to say, hand on chest, ‘It’s a masterpiece, leave it alone’; nor were they able to say exactly what was wrong, though they all made suggestions as to what to cut, what to shift. Conscious that Welles was feeling usurped, Cotten sought to reassure him: ‘Jack [Moss], I know, is doing all he can … his opinions about the cuts, right or wrong, I know are the results of sincere, thoughtful, harassed days and nights, Sundays, holidays. Nobody in the Mercury is trying in any way to take advantage of your absence. Nobody anywhere thinks you haven’t made a wonderful, beautiful inspiring picture. Everybody in the Mercury is on your side always … we all love you … and until then remain forever as all of us do. Obediently yours.’

  Welles was not so certain. SURE I MUST BE AT LEAST PARTLY WRONG, he wired Jack Moss, BUT CANNOT SEE REMOTEST SENSE IN ANY SINGLE SUGGESTED CUT OF YOURS, BOB’S, JOE’S.9 He was convinced that the crucial new scene he had suggested, in which George discusses Eugene, cannot have been well enough shot by Wise, and he ‘absolutely insisted’ that Norman Foster reshoot it. He proposed new music for it; and a redub of Fanny’s line ‘George, George’, which had earned such a big laugh at Pomona. SURE THIS WILL KILL LAUGH OR I’M CRAZY STOP I GUESS I AM ANYWAY MUCH LOVE ORSON. Nothing could better demonstrate the impossibility of Welles’s situation. Any or all of what he had suggested might have been perfectly sensible or effective, but to do it by remote control, as he had done with Bonito, was doomed. He was working from the answer print, but had no means other than guesswork of judging the effect of his proposed changes. Nonetheless (or perhaps because of this), he kept up a steady bombardment of suggestions, some of which were effected. According to the assistant editor Mark Robson, he and Wise would work ‘100 – 110 – 120 hours a week … we were so overwhelmed by the amount of work that we both moved away from our houses and our homes and into a motel in Culver City. There were endless hours and I don’t think we were paid any more for the 100th hour than for the first.’ Among their many re-edits was the destruction of the lovingly planned and superbly executed seamless tracking shot at the Ambersons’ ball, which now, with cutaways, became a conventional sequence – still beautiful and absorbing, but no longer a metaphor for a way of life; no longer a unique artistic gesture.

  Meanwhile, in Brazil, the work seemed to have ground almost to a standstill. ‘Events change from day to day and nothing – not even life and death – means very much here,’ wrote Tom Pettey. ‘It is a lazy land and I’m afraid the germ has got into the company.’ Curiously, his faith in the venture had grown, certain that they were going to get ‘a real pix’, and he added: ‘I will stake my money on Welles coming but of this with added fame.’10 Welles had told him that he would take thirty days to complete the Carnival reshoots and the Urca sequence; then he was off to the north, to Fortaleza, while – dreams of Peruvian conquest still in the air – another crew went to Lima. Such desultory shooting as there was, was done by Lynn Shores; when he was absent, Dick Wilson or Bob Meltzer took over. Shores struggled with the fact that what they were trying to shoot no longer existed. Rio was a different city from the thronged, colourful, sexy metropolis of February. ‘Once a year in December there is a packed house at the Jockey Club, otherwise it looks like Pomona fairgrounds on a blue Monday’ – an unfortunate reference whose significance he could not have known.11

  The entire front entrance of the Copacabana was being rebuilt and was thus a mass of scaffolding and unfinished masonry. ‘The beaches are full of little black children except on Sundays when
sometimes there is a turnout for about an hour. This turnout we are trying to get for ourselves.’ The weather was atrocious, and the natives uncooperative. Sailors enlisted as extras simply didn’t turn up. ‘I can only do what one individual in a foreign land can try to do under conditions where getting a cup of coffee is almost a Federal deal.’ There were problems with fuel for the generators: they needed 20,000 gallons of the stuff. ‘At present there is not this much gas in all Brazil.’ No one was any closer to knowing what the film was supposed to be. Welles changed his mind all the time: ‘That is all we seem to be doing – getting ready to shoot something but we never shoot it … we would all like to work if somebody would please tell us what to do.’ Shores himself had been writing scenes, then shooting them, ‘and it still isn’t any good’. Tom Pettey bemoaned that ‘We still haven’t done any of the script stuff.12 The studio has been ready and waiting for 10 days or so. Urca nightclub could have been done weeks ago. We made a couple of abortive stabs at the Rio Jangadeiro shots, but they will have to be done over as Orson didn’t like the set-ups and walked out.’

  Where was Welles? What was he doing? Partly, he was simply having a very good time. Cy Enfield recollects Jack Moss showing him some of the Brazilian footage at around this time. It showed chorus girls in a line. Welles had told Moss, ‘I fucked her, and her, and her.’ He was also planning his radio broadcasts. He was giving lectures. He was dreaming his jangadeiros sequence. Above all, he was trying to influence the reworking of The Magnificent Ambersons. During this period, he was running up telephone and cable bills of $1,000 a week, a phenomenal figure for 1942.

  Back in Hollywood, Lynn Shores’s reports had spread panic. Walter Daniels, Shores’s spymaster, noted in a memo to Reg Armour that there was ‘no assurance that our trek is paying off as we had hoped’.13 The Carnival footage, he says, is no good; ‘The picture will be salvaged at the studio here – as all location pictures are – by shooting additional scenes in colour to bridge and point up action.’ He tells Armour ‘to instruct Mr Welles’ to give Shores an outline of Four Men on a Raft and let him film such long shots and location shots as may be necessary, while returning himself to finish the film in the studio. ‘I feel that Shores is capable of doing a good job on his own with less cost in time than can be accomplished by the present set-up.’ This astounding suggestion was not followed through, though Welles did indeed give Shores a further outline of Four Men on a Raft. Reg Armour nonetheless forwarded the memo to his superior, Charles Koerner, with Shores’s latest letter. The noose was tightening around Welles’s neck. It seems that he had no inkling of the gravity of his situation. The ‘large dreams’ of which he had spoken to Phil Reismann were becoming more real to him than Hollywood’s reality; and Rio was providing him with a very satisfactory lifestyle. Shores reported that he had taken a year’s lease on an apartment. ‘Just why I cannot seem to find out.’14 Shores had taken a small apartment, too, ‘in self-defense’. Tom Pettey reported the same thing to Herb Drake: ‘it looks like Orson is going to make Rio his home and I’ll be damned if I am … I’ll continue to give you all the news that’s safe to print.15 There really are some swell stories here, but not the sort a press agent does. I’ve killed more stories than Sgt York killed Germans since I’ve been here and some of them died hard.’

  Phil Reismann, back at his desk in Hollywood, tried to give Welles a broad hint of the way things were developing for Schaefer at RKO. BE SURE AND LEAVE HIM A REASONABLE OUT, wired Reismann, AS CONFIDENTIALLY HE HAS HAD TERRIFIC PROBLEMS WITH BOARD AND I MEAN TERRIFIC.16 There was a new pressure, Reismann told him: Columbia was shooting a film called Carnival in Rio in the first or second week in April. Apart from Schaefer, Reismann was the only real friend Welles had at RKO; Koerner was now moving in on the Mercury’s financial affairs. In a memo to Jack Moss he berates him in schoolmasterly terms for overspending by $3,500 on Haki’s new last line and other retakes for Journey into Fear. As far as that film was concerned, Welles was still convinced that he needed a better last appearance and telegrammed Norman Foster to that effect, urging him to come to Rio to shoot it. Astonishingly he adds: TELL JACK ITS MORE IMPORTANT FOR YOU TO COME TO RIO THAN BOB WISE, suggesting that Welles still failed to grasp the importance of his personal involvement in the reworking of The Magnificent Ambersons.17 Brazil seems to have, changed his perspectives. ALL EXPECTATIONS SURPASSED AND EVERY DAY BRINGS A NEW EXPECTATION, he wired exuberantly to Phil Reismann.18

  George Schaefer’s anxieties spill over in yet another minatory cable, this time more personal: I WANT YOU TO BELIEVE THAT I AM PERSONALLY ON THE HOOK FOR THE WHOLE SOUTH AMERICAN VENTURE … CLEARLY OUTLINED TO MY BOARD THAT CERTAIN EXTENT (OF GOVT FUNDING) DID NOT PERMIT US TO ALLOT FOUR MEN TECHNICOLOR.19 He no longer attempts to conceal from Welles the growing amount of animosity he inspires: IT WOULD CAUSE YOUR MAN FRIDAY TREMENDOUS AMOUNT OF PERSONAL EMBARRASSMENT AND EVERYONE IN PARTICULAR TAKING KEEN DELIGHT THAT YOU HAD NOT LIVED UP TO WHAT I HAD EXPECTED AND WHAT I HAD STATED WOULD BE DONE. The attempts at humour, and the fatherly concern for Welles’s professional standing, continue to modify Schaefer’s rising panic. By contrast, other executives of RKO were taking action without troubling to consult Welles, or indeed Schaefer. From the beginning of April, by decree of Reg Armour, all funds were to be administered from Hollywood on a weekly basis. Cash flow immediately became difficult; Shores started cancelling shooting days because of lack of money, telling Dick Wilson that ‘he neither wished to go to jail or to go through another day like yesterday’.20 Welles furiously cabled Schaefer: THESE COMMITMENTS VALID AND AS PRODUCER I SHOULD BE CONSULTED BEFORE THEIR VALIDITY IS QUESTIONED.21 He insisted that if he did not hear from Schaefer personally in these matters, he must hear FROM WHOMEVER IS ISSUING THE ORDERS.

  It is clear that he had no grasp of the real position. His daily battles with Lynn Shores were more real to him. They continued unabated, to the extent that Dick Wilson wrote a frank memorandum for RKO’s head office entitled ‘On the Lynn Shores matter’, little knowing that head office was 100 per cent united behind Shores and must have laughed hollowly on receipt of Wilson’s complaints.22 The memorandum discloses the childishness of behaviour on both sides. From the start, Wilson says, Shores has over-stated the poor morale on the film. Resentful of the work he has had to do, he has voluntarily taken on more of it, for which he demanded and got more money. He is temperamental: once, after being kept waiting for half a hour, he walked off the set; Welles phoned him again and again till 3 a.m., but he ‘absolutely and profanely’ refused to come back. Shores has freely expressed his dislike of Bob Meltzer, and has openly stated that Welles doesn’t know what he is doing. He constantly states, says Wilson, that the film is ‘nothing but a Goddam nigger picture’ and that they ought to drop the whole thing; he is particularly opposed to the jangadeiros sequence, asserting that ‘nobody wants to look at a bunch of niggers’. Just to be helpful, the cameraman Harry Wild told Shores that Welles considered him a spy and a double-crosser (which of course is precisely what he was). When confronted with this, Welles told Wilson that he had a ‘sincere and basic dislike’ for Shores and ‘that type of man’ and that, if and when he had a dinner for the group, he was going to invite everybody but him. They could think what they wanted; Shores was to be the fall guy for everything he could pin on him. Wilson disagreed (silently), feeling that Shores could do them a great deal of harm; but nothing would have discouraged Welles. If he disliked someone upon whom he depended, he was constitutionally incapable of dealing cleverly with them.

  Shores’s behaviour was in fact far worse than Wilson knew. On his own initiative, Shores had directly contacted Dr Alberto Pessao of the Press and Propaganda Department of the Brazilian government, to warn him that Welles was continuing to concentrate on ‘the negro and low class element’ in and around Rio, adding that the scenes filmed in the Teatro Republica were all ‘in very bad taste. This letter,’ he concludes, ‘is personal and I feel that I am expressing the feelings of the majority of our
working crew here in Rio.’23 He is anxious, he unctuously claims, about the effect the footage will have on ‘the good relations existing between our country and yours … I am holding the negative of this film and not shipping it through for development until I can perhaps have a talk with you on this subject to be sure that I am not unduly alarmed over its possible consequences.’ The immediate outcome of this breathtaking act of disloyalty was a visit to Wilson from Dr Pessao, who courteously regretted the shooting in the favelas: ‘Mr Welles knows what to do with his own picture, but here it is not like in the U.S., where you can show everything including ugly things.’24 He quoted the Prefutura of Rio, who had said, ‘We are trying so hard to change the condition of the favelas, it isn’t characteristic of Brazil.’ Wilson replied, somewhat disingenuously, that ‘Very possibly that was exactly what Mr Welles wanted to show – how beautiful and modern Brazil is.’ The Rio newspapers were full of it, too: ‘CARIOCA CARNIVAL IS GOING TO BE VERY DARK ON THE SCREEN’ complained A Noite.25 RKO was even more perturbed, on purely commercial grounds. Reg Armour of the finance department reported to Phil Reismann that the production department had informed him that out of 67,000 feet of 35mm film, plus fifty-nine rolls of 16mm, only two reels could be used ‘for entertainment purposes in this country’. Technicolor, he said, had heightened the effect of dark-skinned Brazilians. ‘There is much footage showing people of the negroid type either dancing with or in close proximity to people with lighter skins, and this in our opinion will seriously militate against the showing of this film in certain sections of this country, particularly the South.’