Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  The new end he suggested has an interesting, classically Wellesian flourish: after some outrageous new plot twists, Haki is found in a lobby with Josette (‘This is just a corner of the lobby such as comes within the capacities of Brazilian set-builders,’ states the stage direction.) A journalist ‘who resembles nobody so much as Richard Wilson’ asks Haki who she is. ‘A young lady who’s been sporting enough at the last minute to consent to join me for dinner,’ he replies. (‘Need I promise that all this will flow along at a pleasant clip?’ Welles interjects.) ‘Is that the story?’ asks the journalist. ‘No,’ Haki says, ‘that’s not the story’ – at which he steps into an elevator, turns to the camera and continues, ‘but I sincerely hope it’s a good enough end for the story’. Looks at the audience for a minute, then smiles: ‘Good night, everyone!’ This cheeky little sequence, whose success would entirely depend on Welles’s own outrageous charm, was never shot.

  What is striking about the letter is its merriness, at a point when The Magnificent Ambersons was beginning to slip completely out of his control and the Brazilian shoot was in the grip of all-pervading tension and panic. Meanwhile the preview of Journey into Fear in Pasadena, as part of a Koernerian double bill with the whimsical Charles Laughton comedy The Tuttles of Tahiti, produced an excellent response. Jack Moss wired Welles that he had overheard very favourable comments. THEY LOVED EVERYBODY, he said, EVEN BANAT (the part he played himself);6 one card-filler cited ‘fat man with glasses’ as his favourite character. ‘We should have more pictures like these,’ another had said; ‘it is a relief to see something besides army and navy pictures.’ Foster, in a measured letter after the preview, suggested that some cuts might be in order: the audience seemed to want ‘Jo to turn into Dick Tracey and outwit the Gestapo single-handed’.7 He was also unenthusiastic about Welles’s proposed ending, which he found simply too long. En passant he remarks, quite casually, that he liked Ambersons very much at a preview, and is sure that it will be a fine picture – a worryingly cool response from such a warm and expressive collaborator. ‘We all really miss you every minute,’ Foster continues, lightly slipping in the information that he has been off salary since 26 March. ‘Not that I care as long as I’m a Mercury jerkery. Will you please make a tag of Col Haki, nose and all … but keep it brief unlike this letter.’ Welles replied, ‘I can’t be very intelligent about Journey because I haven’t seen it … also it does seem to me as though I can’t agree with anybody about anything any more.8 The rest of the world must be going crazy. I think the tag I sent you was a perfect catharsis, but then as I say I haven’t seen the film put together …. I love you with all my heart.’

  The freely expressed love with which Welles showered his collaborators was as fulsomely returned. The degree of it is striking, uncommon even today, in our much more touchy-feely world, even in show business; in 1942 it is almost shocking, and rather touching, especially since they are all men. It has nothing to do with sex, but it is remarkably intimate. ‘I love you, more than I even realised. And I miss you like the devil,’ Norman Foster wrote to him in one of their exchanges.9 ‘Jesus, what a letter. All I really wanted to say was that I miss you very much, and love you very much, and that I have been happier since I’ve been with you than ever before, and that if you’re going to stay down there long, I’m going to bum my way down too.’ Welles’s reply to this exuberant letter of Foster’s shows him unexpectedly subdued, private and vulnerable: ‘At dinner tonight I complained to Bob and Dick that nobody I loved had written me since I left. This observation was followed by a lengthy and morose silence. We finally paid the check and came home where I found your letter.’10

  John Berry, later a film director in his own right, but then touring Native Son around America, wrote to Welles at about the same time: ‘I think constantly of being with you and there is nothing I would rather do than work with you. This is a thing that becomes more obvious every time I see the work of the so-called “artistic theatre” directors’11 (he names Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis). ‘Not only is the theatre dead this season, it is spinning in its grave. So if I may say it, how wonderful it would be if you came back and did a show. Five Kings is always in my mind – sometimes I even dream of it – I loved it more than anything you ever did.’ And a couple of days before, the hard-bitten Phil Reismann had wired Welles: NEVER REALISED I WOULD MISS ANY MALE COMPANION AS MUCH AS I HAVE MISSED YOU SINCE I LEFT RIO STOP YOU SORT OF GROW ON ME LIKE A WART.12 With his male collaborators – especially those ten or more years older than him – Welles was at the same time one of the boys, an inspiring leader and a vulnerable youngster. He was able to be simultaneously father, brother and son to them. He looked after them; he relied on them; he looked up to them. He made his working partners feel they were all in it together and that heaven and earth were there for the winning. Everything, in fact, that Foster meant by being a Mercury jerkery.

  On 6 May 1942, his twenty-seventh birthday, Welles was inundated with affectionate telegrams, from Dadda Bernstein, Jo Cotten (BIRTHDAY GREETINGS TO AN OLD FRIEND FROM AN OLD MAN), Herb Drake (SO ITS YOUR BIRTHDAY WHAT WILL YOU THINK OF NEXT), various telegrams from actors and twenty-seven kisses from Dick Wilson’s wife, Catherine. There was a telegram from George Schaefer, too, with a not entirely light-hearted message: DEAR ORSON MANY HAPPY RETURNS OF THE DAY I KNOW YOU HAVE MANY PROBLEMS BUT BE YOUR AGE. The real world was not half so nice. Just three days after Foster’s loving letter to Welles, Reg Armour sent a memo to Jack Moss refusing to authorise retakes for Journey into Fear. ‘We have now finally decided to complete the picture with the film we have on hand without incurring any further expenses of any nature whatever.’13 A few days later, Charles Koerner, furious that Everett Sloane and Eustace Wyatt had been brought in from New York for reshoots, decreed that every penny by which Journey into Fear exceeded its budget was to be deducted from Welles’s salary cheques. At this point, that amounted to some $150,000. But Welles, oblivious, continued to offer new solutions to the problem of the ending: HAVE VERY SWELL NEW FAST CHEAP JOURNEY FINISH, he wired Jack Moss exuberantly a month after Armour’s official termination of reshooting.14

  All this while The Magnificent Ambersons was being hacked up by a bunch of amateurs and studio journeymen. Welles had never ceased to engender new proposals to overcome what everyone told him were the film’s shortcomings. Robert Carringer, who has closely analysed Welles’s proposals, rightly observes that some of his suggested cuts seem more brutal than any of the studio’s, and his belief that the answer to the film’s problems was a cheery end-credit sequence is bewilderingly irrelevant, the merest rearrangement of deckchairs on the Titanic. In any case, it appears from a shocking but unverifiable anecdote of Cy Enfield’s that even the Mercury office was unable to deal with his flood of suggestions. Enfield was employed as a dogsbody by Jack Moss because he knew magic, and Moss wanted him to teach him a few tricks to impress Welles on his return:

  A telephone with a private line had been installed in Moss’s office in the Mercury bungalow that had a number known only to Orson in Brazil. For the first few days he had discussions with Orson and tried to placate him: then they had started arguing because there were more changes than Orson was prepared to acknowledge. After a few days of this, the phone was just allowed to ring and ring. I conducted many magic lessons with Moss when the phone was ringing uninterruptedly for hours at a time. I saw Jack enter carrying 35 and 45 page cables that had arrived from Brazil; he’d riffle through the cables, say, ‘This is what Orson wants us to do today,’ and then, without bothering to read them, toss them into the wastebasket.

  Whatever the truth of this dark little story (and since a number of thirty- and forty-five-page cables survive, along with the replies to them, there seems to be a grain of truth in it), Moss – along with Robert Wise, Joseph Cotten and Freddie Fleck, the assistant director – was certainly a central figure in the reshaping of The Magnificent Ambersons. As we have seen, Welles reposed an astonishing amount of artistic authority in the
hands of this failed conjuror-turned-business-manager. The little Mercury team he led was under immense pressure from Schaefer and, increasingly, Koerner, first of all to lighten the tone and secondly to shorten the film. Each of the team, in his own way, was trying to preserve the essence of Welles’s work, but they started from the premise that serious surgery was required. Jo Cotten had expressed his dismay when he saw the film at the first preview (which, with two cuts, was essentially the film that Welles and Wise had put together) and sought to mitigate what he regarded as its gratuitous sombreness. The focus of their anxieties was on the bitter, ironic end of the film, and especially on the element that so strongly reinforced this bleakness, the brilliantly crafted score provided by Bernard Herrmann.

  Herrmann was not the man for artistic compromise; not the man, indeed, for compromise of any sort. He was scarcely capable of calm conversation under the most easy-going circumstances: his biographer Steven Smith quotes an interview that Herrmann gave to a journalist called Zador, who transcribed it meticulously; it gives a fine flavour of his temperament:

  ZADOR:

  Did you find [Welles] easy to get along with?15

  HERRMANN:

  I always find difficult people easy to get along with. I only find glad-Harrys difficult and vacuous. Nice guys are difficult. It’s because they’re a bunch of empty-heads, that’s why they’re nice guys! They pretend to be nice guys, but it’s a disguise. They’re not nice. They’re vicious, vindictive people who try to make sure that anything good HASN’T GOT A CHANCE!

  ZADOR:

  Then Orson Welles, who’s a difficult person, gave you a chance …

  HERRMANN:

  HE DIDN’T GIVE ME ANY CHANCE! I gave HIM a chance! I had a job and he was just an actor who we used … what the hell … he didn’t give me any JOB.

  ZADOR:

  Well, for Citizen Kane and Magnificent Ambersons …

  HERRMANN:

  He didn’t give me a job. It was his advantage to have me do the music for him! He didn’t give me a job or a break or anything … for chrissakes, what’s working in there, an accounting department?

  ZADOR:

  Did you select the various passages to be scored?

  HERRMANN:

  Yes, I do that. It’s my profession and not theirs.

  ZADOR:

  Well, you’re sure good at it.

  HERRMANN:

  WELL THAT’S MY TALENT. WHADDYA THINK I NEED SOME HALF-WIT TO TELL ME WHAT HE THINKS … I like music that is proud of itself. I don’t like a guy who says, ‘It’s a good idea, but it’s too good for those creeps who come in and look at a movie, so I’ll debase it.’

  ZADOR:

  Well, that’s not always done by choice.

  HERRMANN:

  NO! It is done by choice. You don’t have-ta do it! You say, I’m not your man, get somebody else. Don’t tell ME that he has to make a buck – look what Schubert put up with.

  The head of RKO’s music department, the lustrously named Constantin Bakaleinikoff, had already had an incendiary encounter with this uniquely rebarbative individual at the beginning of work on The Magnificent Ambersons, trying to push him away from quoting the music of Waldteufel, which was still in copyright, towards that of Johann Strauss, which was not. Herrmann immediately referred the matter to Welles, who just as swiftly issued a curt memo: ‘Use Toujours ou jamais as directed by Herrmann.’16 At Welles’s behest, he was given unique freedom within the music department; he was in fact almost entirely independent from it. Amongst other things, he had the right (shared by Korngold, for example, but by very few others) to orchestrate his own music, which he did to revolutionary effect, scarcely endearing himself to the studio orchestrators in the process. The score he wrote for The Magnificent Ambersons was even more striking than that for Citizen Kane in its interaction with the dramatic life of the film. Since the film itself was destroyed, we can never know exactly how the score might have worked, but fortunately the music was not destroyed, and the highly sophisticated compositional procedures that Herrmann employed can be heard.

  The Waldteufel waltz, or part of it, is used as a paradigm of the Ambersons themselves. It is first heard gently and delicately on muted solo violin joined by harps; then, in richly enhanced form, even plusher than in the original orchestration, it reaches its apotheosis in the chain of period dances that accompany the ball. From then on its increasingly rare appearances are fragmentary and often dissonant as the Ambersons’ world breaks up. The future, so inimical to the Ambersons, is evoked in music (as Kathryn Kalinak notes in her elegant analysis of the score) made of short, non-melodic phrases, often highly chromatic and devoid of harmonic support; the instrumentation is increasingly percussive. The score contained an entirely characteristic instruction from Herrmann to his brass players for the scene in which George Minafer meets his comeuppance: ‘cup mute more nasal; mechanical; reed-like; music should sound like [the] character’, which is as good an example as may be found of Herrmann’s absolute engagement with the specific work in hand. The gleeful music of the sleigh ride in the snow scene wholly eschews the generic, presenting an a-thematic impression of perpetual motion: ‘absence of melody, gravitation towards atonality, repetition of key motifs, and unusual instrumental colour’, as Miss Kalinak says.17 It was not this sequence, of course, with which the revisionists took issue: it was the grim, spare music of the final reels of the film, music of alienation, of despair, of failure – a long, bleak organ solo under the garden scene, a murky elegy in the old people’s home, with harsh brass and edgy strings, and finally a sombre, Mahlerian threnody for the end titles, reprising the earlier love music in anguished form, topped off with a bitter, ironic allusion on vibraphone to Waldteufel’s genial little waltz tune: Toujours ou jamais, indeed.

  This is music of quite uncommon imagination, but it is undeniably sombre, as both Herrmann and Welles intended it to be. This is the element that had to be extirpated, and, after Pomona – the watershed of catastrophe for Ambersons – extirpated it was. More than half of all the music Herrmann had written was replaced by anodyne schlock, all golden harmonies and surging emotions, imbecilically replicating the feelings of the characters on the screen. It was written by RKO’s resident composer, Roy Webb, the sort of stuff he ran up by the yard. It is a musically incontinent ramble, garrulous where Herrmann was terse (and, as often, daringly silent), designed to put a smile on the audience’s face where none belonged. Herrmann was neither consulted about this nor informed of it; the moment he did find out, he demanded that his name be removed from the credits. At first RKO resisted, but studio executive Gordon Youngman was clearly shocked by is forthrightness – as who would not be. ‘Am convinced,’ he wrote in a memo, ‘in view of man’s temperament he will bring injunction proceeding and cause all other trouble he can.18 His theory is that statement is made score is by BH while it is not entirely so and that this is deception to public and injurious his reputation.’ Herrmann passionately urged the studio to reconsider the desirability of making cuts in the film. He won the battle for his own integrity, though the battle for that of the film was lost. If he felt betrayed by Welles, whose job it was to shield him from this sort of thing as he had so often done in the past, he never said so; but this is what happens when the director is absent. Had some of Welles’s other collaborators been equally obdurate, The Magnificent Ambersons might exist in something like its original form, though it is equally true that RKO, and especially Charles W. Koerner, had long ago made up their minds to cut it down to size, in every sense.

  Previews continued, with rather more encouraging responses, at Inglewood, then, after substantial recutting and some reshooting, at Long Beach. But for every comment saying, ‘new style of direction is very fascinating’, there were three saying, ‘it would take an IQ of 120 or more to really enjoy it’, ‘75 minutes of gloom and camera acrobatics’ or, rather more bluntly ‘much too boresome’. The feeling was not entirely negative, but neither was it positive. Mark Robson commented
that ‘it reached a point where we had to pick up the film at the booth, people were waiting for us as if they were going to beat us up. They were so angered and annoyed.’ All the brutal surgery had scarcely altered the general reaction. The same phrases recur, as if they were part of a popular critical vocabulary. The overall gist is highly consistent – the film is: a) out of tune with the country’s mood; b) too arty; c) too dark. The actors most often praised are now Costello, Cotten, Holt and the artist endearingly referred to in one questionnaire as ‘Fanny Moorehead’. Clearly something even more radical was called for. In the absence of Welles’s personal presence, Moss and his team sought some kind of lodestone, some point of reference for what they were trying to do, and they came back, perhaps inevitably, to the novel, and above all its end, that curious modulation into mysticism that seems so out of line with the realism of the rest of the book, with the characters as we have come to know them and with Tarkington’s solid prose style; he seems to abandon the grand themes he has so powerfully pursued in favour of unearned extra-terrestrial uplift. Welles’s final scene, his single most creative contribution to the screenplay, is equally out of line with the rest of the book, but it progresses the characters much more satisfyingly, providing a vivid final illustration of the Ambersons’ terminal decline; and it is cinema, not literature. This was the scene that particularly stuck in the audience’s craw, and so Jack Moss – book-keeper, office manager, sometime conjuror – took pen and paper and adapted the scene with which Tarkington had ended the book and then directed Anne Baxter, Jo Cotten and Agnes Moorehead in it, finally ensuring the obliteration of Welles’s vision.