Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  Armour was equally implacable on the matter of the budget: unless Welles could shoot the Urca Casino sequence for nothing, he said in an internal memorandum, it would be better to shoot it in Hollywood – for technical reasons, apart from anything else. So far the Rio sequence had cost $241,000; he calculated that a further $288,000 was needed to complete it, adding up to $529,000, even without the Mexican sequence; with that and post-production (which might involve reshoots) the total cost of the film would be $1.3m – as much as Citizen Kane. Both The Magnificent Ambersons and Journey into Fear, he claimed, ‘are destined to end up in the red’; Citizen Kane itself would at very best only break even. ‘If Welles keeps on the way he is going, he can very easily wreck this company and it would be my recommendation that his operations as far as RKO is concerned be brought to a termination immediately.’ Armour was a quintessential corporation man: sound money was his only criterion, and he was still quaking with rage and disapproval fifty years later when he was interviewed for a BBC documentary on RKO. ‘I cannot understand his wanton waste of money,’ his 1942 memorandum continued. ‘Welles for all his failings is a very capable producer-director and his record to date in Rio, in our opinion, shows that he has not made an effort to lick the story problem or place his activities on a basis where the corporation has a chance of breaking even.’

  Armour and many of his colleagues at RKO felt that Welles was deliberately and consciously dragging the company to ruin – and their living with it. One of Schaefer’s increasingly desperate telegrams said that he was rapidly coming to the conclusion that Welles had: NO REALISATION OF MONEY YOU SPEND AND HOW DIFFICULT IT IS TO RECOUP COST. It is hard not to agree that Welles had come to believe that It’s All True was a project whose importance was beyond financial computation; from an artistic and cultural point of view, this may or may not have been the case, but it reveals a deep ignorance of, and indifference to, the realities of the company’s parlous position. WHEN I FINISH THIS PICTURE YOU WILL SEE WHAT I MEAN, Welles cabled. UNLESS I CAN FINISH FILM AS IT MUST BE FINISHED FOR ENTERTAINMENT VALUE THE ENTIRE EXPENDITURE OF TIME AND EFFORT WILL BE TOTAL LOSS. Schaefer slammed back: THIS IS OUT OF ALL PROPORTION TO WHAT WE EVER ESTIMATED AND WE CANNOT GO ALONG ON THAT BASIS EVEN IF WE HAVE TO CLOSE DOWN SHOW AND ASK YOU TO RETURN … THERE ARE SOME DEVELOPMENTS THAT LOOK VERY UNPLEASANT IN ALL DIRECTIONS.

  But Welles was now fully adrenalised and nothing was going to stop him. ‘The seasons change but Orson goes on forever,’ wrote Tom Pettey. ‘You think you know Orson. Well wait until you see him directing a color scene in a low key. Man, that’s something. This is the first week he has done any directing at all and he’s busy making up for lost time. He has a caned-bottom rocking chair which is liable to turn over at any moment, loose bowels and the disposition of a teething baby – and that’s in the mornings … members of the crew have been known to dash out of the place and race down six flights of stairs to the bar to calm their shattered nerves,’ continued Pettey. ‘I think you had better order a couple of beds for the fellows in a first-class madhouse if they ever return. Shores and Wilson,’ he added, ‘have so many worries and troubles that they practice voodism and chatter in gibberish.’

  Welles was anxious that the outside world should give due weight to what he was doing. Incensed by a slighting reference to the film – ‘our work and mission here’, as he put it – in a recent edition of Time magazine, he angrily cabled Herb Drake to get Jock Whitney or Nelson Rockefeller to write a letter in his support. Meanwhile Dick Wilson had asked Berent Friele of the I-AA office similarly to endorse the importance of what he was doing in Brazil, which Friele duly did, in the most fulsome terms (despite an earlier anxious private conversation with Wilson). Friele details Welles’s ambassadorial contribution, citing interviews, receptions, galas, awards, speeches and high-level meetings with politicians, artists and scientists. ‘The fact that Welles is enough of an authority on so many subjects has been of much fundamental value to the work done here aside from the picture.’ The range of extra-curricular activities that Friele describes (quite apart from the film) is almost bewildering: in March alone, Welles gives a lecture on ‘The Brazilian Subject in Motion Pictures’; a month later he gives the first of four lectures (Literature, Painting, Graphic Arts, Music) on ‘The Development of Art and Literature in America’. Brazilians, says Friele, were impressed by his trip up north (a journey rarely made by visitors to the country), and by the friendships Welles had struck up there; the visit to Buenos Aires, where he received an award for Citizen Kane, had been a huge success from the point of view of international relations. He had made two highly successful broadcasts from Rio, Pan-American Day and a curious programme celebrating Getúlio Vargas’s birthday, both forerunners of the Hello Americans series he would later develop.

  The Vargas broadcast is Welles’s love-letter to Brazil. It comes from the Urca Casino, where he has been filming – ‘one of last truly gay places in the world’. He introduces the bands, translates the samba Todo es Brazil (‘Everything is Brazil’), his voice throbbing, and finally delivers a paean to the achievements of modern Brazil – all thanks, he says, to Vargas. ‘There has been no American visitor,’ says Friele, ‘who has understood the country, its people and its problems so quickly and so well as Welles.’ ‘What energy, what vitality, what ubiquity is in this great Brazilian!’ wrote the poet and cinéaste, Vinicius De Moraes (later inspiration of Orfeu Negro). ‘Brazilian, yes; Orson Welles is beginning to know Brazil, or at least an important side of the soul of Brazil, better than many sociologists, novelists, critics and poets. His vision is at times raw, but he never sins through injustice. Knowing better than anyone how to understand our character, our foibles, our easy-going ways, our so-to-speak “negative” qualities … Welles has felt Brazil and the Brazilian people in a deeper, richer way than the vast majority of foreigners who have lived among us.’ He is still the darling of the intellectuals. This urban, canapé-nibbling, cocktail-sipping Welles is a very different Welles from the one his film crew knew. There is no contradiction here. There are at least as many Welleses as there are Charles Foster Kanes; the problem was to find time for them all. It was congenial to Welles during a great deal of his time in Brazil to fulfil what he thought of as his mission as a roving polymath, interpreting North America to the South, and vice versa. What, in time of war, could be more important than hemispheric solidarity? Was it not government policy, specifically endorsed by Roosevelt and even more explicitly by his Vice-President, Henry Wallace, to whom Welles was if anything even closer, politically? And no doubt the work he was doing was valuable, in its way. But it was not the primary purpose for which he was there, as he suddenly seemed to realise after his return from Buenos Aires, when It’s All True seemed at last to come into focus for him; thereafter, he devoted himself exclusively to filming it.

  What he was now filming was highly contentious, however. His run-in with Shores and Dr Pessao had done nothing to modify his approach. ‘I have had to lie and the for the last two or three weeks to keep the local reporters away from the studio,’ wrote Tom Pettey. ‘If they ever got in and saw some of the shanty life we are doing they would write Orson out of town.’ Welles was shooting sequences – ‘dynamite in Rio’ – involving macumba, the Brazilian version of voodoo. ‘We have a closed set full of jigiboos and a little set depicting a hut in the hills,’ added Pettey. ‘Relations between Welles and the crew are still bad. There are days when it looks like everything is going to be happy and then he will pull some sudden stunt such as picking up a gal and vanishing in his car for a couple of hours or getting in a row with the person nearest to him and everything is bad for the rest of the day.’ Welles had fired the first assistant director, Leo Reislor, for causing trouble with the Brazilians with ‘dictatorial tactics’. Shores retaliated by keeping Reislor on the payroll for office work, a carefully calculated piece of provocation. The atmosphere was heavy with suspicion and counter-suspicion. ‘Somebody has been turning in a detailed report o
n Welles in Rio and it has not been flattering, I am told,’ continued Pettey. ‘Everyone is a suspect … and I am of the opinion that I’m on the list.’ His job, he tells Drake, is becoming almost impossible. Welles has had so much publicity ‘that he feels he can push any of the newspapermen – Brazilian and American – around and that he is above criticism. He’ll find out.’ Now even Pettey wants to go home. ‘Apparently he wants to handle his own public relations with the aid of Dick and Meltzer. I never did get into the family. My knees creak too loudly when I bend them.’

  The atmosphere had become poisonous, on the brink of physical violence. Lynn Shores had told Meltzer, ‘if he didn’t stop doing things he wasn’t supposed to do that he was going to “punch him in the nose’”. Then he told Dick Wilson that ‘this whole thing has gone far enough’, adding, for good measure, that Welles was trying to prolong his stay in Brazil just to avoid the draft. Welles, Shores continued – the gloves now off for good and all – was ‘just a vagabond who could live out of a trunk, but the rest of the men in the group had responsibilities and homes and people they cared about and no one gave a damn about Welles’. He’d seen fifteen directors like Welles, he said; he’d seen them come and go. He was feeding half of them right now in Hollywood.

  The them-and-us division was now complete. The Mercurians – ‘the family’ – were indeed drawing ever closer together, newly invigorated by Welles’s sudden clarity about the project, evolving the film day by day during gaps in shooting and without reference to any of the crew. Shifra Haran kept the minutes of a series of their brainstorming sessions (those ‘meaningless conferences’ so despised by Lynn Shores), which give a vivid account of how Welles worked with his team. The atmosphere was entirely democratic, with Welles functioning as a sort of chairman. The occasion for this particular set of meetings was to discuss the use of chôros in the film. Are they to be heard during Carnival time? Welles argues that ‘since all of our sex appeal so far is presented in violent and vigorous form, one interlude is required presenting element of straight romance. If this can be included legitimately in a carnival sequence, it should be.’ Meltzer is assigned the task of collecting all available chôro recordings and, where possible, sheet music. Since Welles’s point in wanting chôros will be visual, his job is to figure out the location for this sequence. The group then breaks up to continue filming; the discussion resumes the following night. Meltzer spends two hours giving examples of suitable chôros with records and at the piano. The evening after, Welles outlines his idea for the proposed sequence, feeling strongly that romance is an absolutely necessary element. He wants an opportunity to show ‘spooners in the moonlight, young people holding hands, equivalent to couples drifting away from country club dance back in the States’. Later that evening, Welles and Meltzer continue the discussion. Welles has had further ideas about the sequence: ‘orchestra playing at Clube Baile during carnival breaks for a smoke; part of band moves into garden, starts idly playing. Work into Carinhoso.’ Welles has found a girl in Minaes, he says, who has just arrived in Rio at her own expense. He suggests that she should sing the vocal: ‘not actually singing it, lipping it’. She starts to sing with the combo. Elsewhere in the garden a good-looking boy hears her voice, deserts his girl to look for the girl singer, singing himself as he goes. The boy and the girl join up and complete the first chorus; the girl singer deserts her boyfriend to sing with the boy singer. The jilted boy and girl then join up for a fast chôro dance. The orchestra – now complete – changes tempo.

  The scene they are evolving is a very conventional Hollywood one; it could be from almost any Fred and Ginger movie. The only significant difference – and it is an all-important one – is authenticity. Welles and his team are trying to make an old form new, but also to honour the culture they are depicting. The use of non-professional local talent (even if, as here, there might seem to be some ulterior motive) suggests a very different kind of film from the studio-made RKO musical romances, with their stock casts and conventional sets. The search for suitable locations was a crucial part of the discussion, too: apart from anything else, they could not afford to build sets. Welles was deputed to check in the files which clubs had extended invitations to them during Carnival – or perhaps, Welles suggests, they can use the Cinedia studio buildings and gardens, choosing camera angles carefully and putting up a sign saying ‘Petropolis Tennis Clube’; all that’s needed is to decorate the gardens with bunting and string up brightly coloured lights. Welles will spend a couple of hours late the following night, after shooting, working out the angles. There is nothing earth-shaking about these discussions, nothing startlingly visionary: it is a highly recognisable process of group work, collaboration at its most useful and democratic. No doubt Welles made the final decisions and strongly articulated the overall gesture of the film, but he had to do his share of leg-work, checking the list of clubs that had extended invitations to them for example; as the visual aspect is what concerns him most, he must, likewise, sort out locations. In the discussions, he’s trying to save money and improvise cleverly, something with which during the rest of his career he would become very familiar. Everyone in the group has his say; there is no sign of Lynn Shores, of course, or even Harry Wild. This is the kitchen cabinet, the Cabal, the inner sanctum. Welles is scarcely slacking, either: the meetings take place all day; then he shoots; then he works out angles. Improvisation was second nature to Welles; the adrenalin engendered was intoxicating to him, and it was an elusive commodity in a studio.

  At about this point, at the beginning of May 1942, two months after Welles’s arrival in Brazil, the group put down in writing for the first time what kind of film they thought It’s All True might turn out to be. Herb Drake had already had a few stabs at it: this was the official version that they passed on to the front office. The film, the blurb said, would mix comedy and drama. ‘Fact and fiction are served forth in unusual combination in Orson Welles’s It’s All True.26 This screen anthology of varied themes and stories marks a new departure. For the first time a full evening’s entertainment, arranged with the diverse themes and subjects of a popular magazine’s make-up, is combined in one picture …’ In their recapitulation of the story of Bonito, the blurb stresses again the original notion of veracity contained in the film’s title:

  ‘It’s a true story, this story of Bonito and the little boy who loves him. And the story of the jangadeiros who sailed a raft from the Equator to the Tropic of Capricorn is also true – a matter of recent history … burned black from the sun, worn thin as skeletons by hardship and privation, the four fishermen of Fortaleza find themselves heroes. They obtain instant audience with President Vargas, and through his intervention, they win full union rights and pensions. The Carnival becomes a fête in their honour. Then their mission accomplished, the four jangadeiros return to their little fishing village by train, their fares paid by the republic of Brazil. My Friend Bonito and Jangadeiros of Fortaleza are stories of people. Carnaval is music and colour, song and gaiety; a cross section of what goes on in the very hottest latitude of human hilarity.

  The blurb is at great pains to emphasise the film’s accessibility. ‘It is cinema in the grand manner, combining the entertainment features of real life in Brazil with musical comedy, human interest values and constant action … the music of carnival is samba – it’s the soul of the city in hot licks.’ In the film, Welles will follow the course of the samba:

  He takes us to the hills from where the samba comes, the hills above Rio where the poor people of the city have their homes … then comes the opening day of carnival and this samba and other sambas, take possession of the city … the city rocks to their dancing and roars with the reverberations of the drums and the sound of singing. It’s carnival. It is the Samba … in the street outside is Otelo, the gamin leader of a samba band, who has for these four days of merriment dedicated every fibre of his being to singing and to partisanship.

  The cameras follow a little boy around the carnival. As darkne
ss comes over the city, the samba music subsides. The crowds trickle away and, in the deserted square of Praça Onze, Otelo and the little boy are left alone. They are sleeping. The little boy’s cheeks are wet with tears and Otelo, exhausted, lies beside a broken drum. It is the end of Carnival. ‘Next year it will have its rebirth, with new sambas and new crowds and new frenzy to make wild the streets of Rio.’ All in all, it is a plain, coherent account of an entertaining but scarcely radical film. The core of the film – its claim to importance – would have to be the epic of the jangadeiros, and that was all to come, still being dreamed of.

  Meanwhile, a thousand miles away, The Magnificent Ambersons and Journey into Fear, which Armour had so confidently written off from a financial viewpoint even before they were released, were being respectively mutilated and abandoned by RKO.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Turning a Bad Koerner

  WELLES CONTINUED TO regard Journey into Fear as a rather stylish jeu d’esprit. Herb Drake had reported to him enthusiastically that the film was ‘a 100% natural and Dolores is marvellous, which I may as well confess is a surprise to me … I think you will be proud of Norman’s work.1 Altogether, everything looks successful, elegant and happy.’ But Welles knew that everything wasn’t quite working as it should have been, and felt that the ending still needed something – that elusive ‘tag’, which would have to be shot in Rio. He communicated his suggestions directly to Norman Foster, praising him extravagantly – THERE ISN’T A BETTER DIRECTOR ON EARTH THAN YOU ARE AND I LOVE YOU – and ending by asking Foster with unexpected plaintiveness to record a track where they all say hello to him when they do the reshoot.2 I’M LONELY. Foster replied compliantly – COMPLETELY AGREE WITH CABLED INSTRUCTIONS FORTUNATELY HAVE ALTERNATE SHOTS COVERING EVERYTHING – and playfully, as was their wont: I KNOW A BETTER DIRECTOR AND HOW CAN YOU BE LONELY WITH SO MANY REFLECTORS.3 To Jo Cotten, Welles wrote: ‘Everything I have seen of Journey into Fear surpasses anything we had any right to expect for it. You are even better than you were supposed to be … I miss you disastrously.’4 By the same post he wrote to Norman Foster with his proposed rewrite: ‘The dialogue, you will immediately note, is as flawless and sparkling as a rich diamond. There is really nothing to be said of this by way of criticism except, perhaps, that it stinks. In case you think so, wire what you think and see what that gets you.’5 His spirits are obviously high. ‘Why don’t you ever write me long persuasive and informative letters like this one? I miss you seriously and I love you more than I let on.’