Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  That was on 19 May. The same day, a thousand miles away, in Rio de Janeiro, while filming a reconstruction for Orson Welles’s film It’s All True, showing the triumphant arrival of himself and his fellow jangadeiros in the capital to deliver their famous petition to President Getúlio Vargas, Mandel Olimpio Meira, the great popular hero known as Jacaré, drowned.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Four Men on a Raft

  WITH BITTER TIMING, the day before Jacaré drowned, the Life magazine photo-spread shot during the Carnival, at the very beginning of the Brazilian escapade, three long months earlier, finally appeared under the jaunty banner ‘Life Goes to a Party in Rio’. For the group of film-makers still slogging it out in Rio, the party had long been over. The bonhomie and cross-cultural excitement of Carnival had been replaced by exhaustion, frustration and resentment; relations between the film and the community had cooled. The official attitude to the film that Welles was making, despite various broadcasts in which members of the Brazilian government (including Vargas himself) had participated, had abruptly changed in the face of his determination to show the reality of Brazilian life, giving due prominence to the 70 per cent of the population who were working-class and black. The popular press had become equally disenchanted with the image of their city that Welles was filming. He was showing things that they preferred not to be reminded of, things they lived with, but which were not for general consumption. ‘Each time the robust and handsome fiancé of Del Rio points his camera at the so-called “picturesque” spots of the city we feel a slight sense of uneasiness,’ observed Rio Cine-Radio Jornal.1 Instead of filming ‘the lovely edge of the lake, where there is so much beauty and so many marvellous angles for filming’, Welles was promoting the shabby image of the malandro, ‘a good-for-nothing in a striped shirt, dirty straw hat over his eye, who comes in dancing an out-of-joint samba’. He seemed intent on shooting ‘scenes of the hills, of no good half-breeds … and the filthy huts of the favelas … dances of Negroes covered with aracatu feathers, reminiscent of the temples of the African wilds, as though our not always edifying street carnival were not already sufficient’.

  But if bourgeois opinion was turning against Welles, the film’s day-to-day relations with the black working-class population whose lives he sought to celebrate were not of the best, either. The extras were largely drawn from their ranks and proved to be only intermittently interested in the process of filming. Day after day was written off because they failed to show up, or drifted off in the course of filming. The Diary of Welles Group Activities to 27 April is a dismaying record of days lost due to weather, religious festivals, Welles’s illness, Welles’s absence and above all, at the beginning, lack of equipment, which had taken two whole weeks to clear customs; but highest on the list of causes of days lost was ‘no-shows of extras’, disastrous for continuity. Welles was particularly piqued by this behaviour, and would often walk off the set when it occurred. Even on his birthday, 6 May, when there was to have been a party after shooting, the report tersely recorded: ‘rehearsal, shooting Urca; wrap 1 a.m. Loss of time because of non-attendance and lateness of extras and singers’;2 the following day: ‘more problems with extras etc. Welles stays up finishing designs for decoration that night and morning because of limited budget and project’s inability to contract’. In some cases there was open hostility: ‘our period of wholehearted co-operation was over,’ wrote Dick Wilson.3 ‘We were being greeted in the streets with jeers, and – in the case of our shooting of the coloured people – with beer bottles.’

  Work had been proceeding erratically for all the reasons detailed above, but now, in mid-May, after another long period of drift, Welles was enthusiastically at work on the jangadeiros sequence. His personal relationship with the fishermen was warm, the story was heroic and clearly defined, with none of the attendant complications of personnel and staging involved in the nightclub sequences or the reconstruction of the Carnival, though even here there were logistical difficulties. The first Sunday they had attempted to shoot the arrival of jangadeiros in Rio, the crew on half the boats grew impatient and sailed away in the middle of the most difficult portion of the work. ‘No threats, bribes, or payments could hold them. A whole shooting day was lost and a long period of preparatory work went for nothing. This has occurred many many times with varying degrees of disaster in the course of production,’ ended the exasperated report.4 Welles’s own crew were scarcely happier. When the schedule was given to Harry Wild, ‘he blew up completely’, refusing to shoot on a Sunday, Dick Wilson reported to the Office of Inter-American Affairs. ‘He didn’t feel well from the previous night’s shooting, saying that it was very dangerous, everyone had got sick, the men had openly rebelled against him about picking up the cables covered with garbage and slop. People had gathered around him and threatened him etc.’ His general complaint was that they had no one in authority with them. ‘The men are talking night and day,’ Wild said, ‘about how slow we were working and that they would never get home.’ Even the casting department, Wilson noted, was deeply unhappy, due to ‘a conflict of personalities’. A disaffected film crew is like its naval equivalent; mutiny is never far away.

  Welles was under pressure from every angle, personal and professional. Phil Reismann had been despatched to Rio by George Schaefer to bring things to a swift conclusion; he brought with him a letter from Schaefer so severe that he felt the need to forewarn Welles: I HAVE NEVER READ ANYTHING AS STRONG IN MY LIFE AND MY REASON FOR SENDING THIS CABLE IN ADVANCE IS TO PLEAD WITH YOU TO FINISH UP AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE TO AVOID CLOSING OUT THE PRODUCTION COMPLETELY BEFORE IT IS FINISHED.5 Reismann at least remained loyal to Welles; or so it seemed. The minutes of a conversation about Welles between Reismann and Reg Armour from that same week suggest the levels of duplicity that were at work in the Borgia Palace that RKO had become:

  PR:

  [Welles] is a tough baby – he has done a magnificent job of selling himself to Nelson Rockefeller.6

  RA:

  George [Schaefer] will lose his job out of this … I think Orson wants to stay out of the country … he wants to duck military service.

  PR:

  I think I could get the authorities to take him off our hands.

  The Mercury office itself was not free from infection.

  PR:

  Have you talked to Moss at all?

  RA:

  They’re beginning to rat on Welles … they say ‘we told Welles so and so – and now we’re being disloyal to him – but we’ll do it’.

  Reismann had not misled Welles about the severity of Schaefer’s letter, the culmination of a series of missed phone calls and enraged telegrams. But the letter Reismann finally delivered to Welles ten days after it had been written was different in tone and intent from the calls and the wires. It was a soberly comprehensive indictment from the quarter from which he least expected it.

  ‘Here I am in New York,’7 Schaefer wrote, ‘endeavouring against all odds to maintain the same confidence in you as I have had in the past. Facts and developments come so fast and are so overwhelming that it is no longer possible for me to maintain that frame of mind.’ He writes of ‘the crisis which has arisen in my relationship with my company and my relationship with you … you were chosen,’ he says, ‘as the man in whom we could place our confidence’. But that confidence, he continues, detailing the delays, the mendacities and the rising costs, ‘has been betrayed. The thing that disturbs me more than anything else is that people in your unit don’t know from one day to another what they are supposed to do, and that, to me, seems to be the crux of the situation.’ The Brazil sequence is, he says, only one section of It’s All True; the rest of it is equally unfinished. He’s looked at the Bonito the Bull material: they only have 40 per cent of what’s needed, though the accumulated expenses are $400,000 – ‘we are just pouring money down the drainpipe’. Welles has his own writers (several of them) on the payroll, Schaefer says, but there has never been a script. ‘I was astonished to the
point of thinking that even you would have the audacity to turn over such a disgraceful synopsis to Lynn Shores … how in the world with such an outline you expect Shores or even your own men to carry on and give any loyalty to this company and yourself is beyond me to comprehend.’ The whole thing, he says, is a catastrophe, quite apart from the financial aspect: Schaefer placed his confidence in Welles because of his ‘fervid desire’ to do something for his country. It could also have paved the way for future production by the industry in South American countries. ‘They will come to the conclusion that you, the one person in whom they have had confidence, have spoiled all their future possibilities of motion picture production.’ Everyone, he says, admires Welles’s work as ambassador. ‘But, quite evidently, you have come to the conclusion that you are down there representing the Co-ordinator’s office and not RKO.’

  The technicians all want to come home:

  The way I feel right now, I am wondering if the boys will be out of the trenches by Christmas. If there are any personal reasons why you want to stay down till August, or longer, at least get through with the picture, send the men back and stay as long as you wish. That is your personal affair … I am now again put in the painful position where I have to write you a letter which I never, in God’s world, thought I would have to write wherein I am begging you to fulfil in an honourable way your obligations and not put such a terrific load on my shoulders. In respect to the latter, I think I have carried that load a long time.

  He writes of Citizen Kane:

  What it cost this organisation, and me, personally, never can be measured in dollars … the abuse that was heaped on myself and the company will never be forgotten. I was about as punch-drunk as a man ever was. I made my decision to stand by you and I saw it through. I have never asked anything in return, but in common decency I should expect that I would at least have your loyalty and gratitude. To the extent that I have received it with respect to the Brazilian enterprise up to the present time, I would say it has merely been lip service.

  He reviews Welles’s four films, all of them over budget. ‘It was one problem on Citizen Kane; sickness on Ambersons; $150,000 over on Journey into Fear, now what is the answer in Brazil? Here was a real opportunity to show the industry that without adequate equipment and with a most difficult problem, you were able to come through.’ He is sending Phil Reismann to Rio: ‘I have instructed him that he must forget his friendship for you … he has the authority to stop production immediately and call the whole production off and instruct everyone to return. That of course I would dislike to see – particularly because you left in a blaze of glory and made such a fine showing on your arrival. It would be painful to share with you the closing of the show and your instructions to return. Sincerely.’

  This guilt-inducing battering was neatly backed up at almost exactly the same moment by a letter from Welles’s ex-guardian, Dr Maurice Bernstein (‘Dadda’), his mother’s lover and the principal promoter of the infant Welles’s status as a prodigy. His relationship to Welles – now, after all, a world-famous twenty-seven-year-old millionaire, the white hope of the movie industry – remained what it had always been: nagging, loving, censuring, demanding, intensely emotional and comprehensively invasive, resembling the music-hall idea of a Jewish mother, with a touch of nastiness all his own. ‘Did you get my birthday cable?8 It was all we could send – just love. So far I have not received your promised compliance with my request’ – for $ 1,000 – ‘and I am hanging on to the last link now, so don’t wait too long it may break and I’ll sink!’ he writes, adding a hand-written account of how his car needs new valves, $75 worth. ‘Not a good way to start the week and I will walk as long as my arches hold out. PS Did you notice how much it costs me to write to you? I have to go without my meager lunch to mail this.’ When not bombarding Welles with requests for money (he ran a very successful medical practice in Beverly Hills), he was blubbering over his former ward’s – very rare – letters, passing on salacious gossip about Welles’s ex-wife, Virginia, or admonishing him for the flaws in his character.

  The letter Welles received early in May 1942, while he was in the midst of crisis in Rio, is quintessential Dadda. Welles had called him on his birthday: ‘You have made me happy beyond words. I felt like embracing the janitor, the garage man, the garbage collector, the whole world, except the Japs and Hitler! Today, Monday, still back at the office and still happy. Let the old flat smelly feet come in for treatment, what do I care about their feet – I got your call today and their feet will not smell so badly.’ He asks coyly about Welles’s love life: ‘so you hear no more from “a certain party”?’ (a reference, presumably, to Dolores del Rio, from whom Welles had drifted apart during his long absence) and proffers homely advice: ‘please don’t stir up the embers. When the fire dies out, it shows there was little fuel.’ He relays the RKO gossip – all of which is startlingly precise and accurate – and even goes to the heart of the studio’s chief anxiety about the material Welles was shooting: ‘your mixing of the black and the whites cannot be accepted by Iowa, Missouri, not to mention all the people the other side of the Mason Dixon line’. Everyone is convinced, he informs Welles, that Koerner will not renew his contract, then he helpfully recounts a meeting he has just had with Charlie Chaplin, who also, it appears, has strong views on Welles. ‘He like everyone else thinks you have no appreciation of the value of money! Ever hear that before? He thinks you are a great artist, though still young in your conception of human emotion. He had much to say about Kane which he was crazy about, with only the above reservation, of emotional value. He believes in you 100%. I do wish that you could form some sort of alliance with him. You would complement each other.’ Presumably he was fully aware of the Landru debacle. Dr Bernstein presses his advantage, probing Welles’s weaknesses with surgical skill: ‘You need mature minds in your associations, not mere “bulk”. The trouble with your associates has been that you have no respect for them. Most of them have need of you either financially or to help them climb. They therefore all flatter you, try to read your mind, and agree with you without giving you an honest opinion.’ Then he goes for the jugular: ‘I except Jack Houseman. He is the one person I am sorry you broke with.’

  Of all names to taunt Welles with, Bernstein unerringly selects the one that is calculated to drive him into paroxysms of rage – Houseman, who had given him all his early opportunities, but whose attempts to rein him in had provoked Welles’s undying hostility. ‘I know that you do not like to face reality when it comes to business, and so your affairs are generally in a muddle,’ Dr Bernstein continues unrelentingly. ‘I wish too that you would have a little confidence in me. I guided you in a way which I have never regretted. And you STILL need a guardian! The proof of this is that you have little to show after all your tremendous success. You are now a man, and I am talking to you man to man. I am alarmed when I think of the mercenary people who surround you – Moss – his lawyer, and others who have sucked you dry.’ It requires an effort of imagination to envisage anybody talking to Welles in these terms and getting away with it, but his two surrogate fathers, Skipper and Dadda, hold a critical key to Welles’s psychology. A considerable part of him remained emotionally immature, even dependent: he was writing to and communicating with both these men until the day they died, accepting without complaint their steady stream of alternating cajolement and exaltation. To these semi-familial figures may be added that of Arnold Weissberger, the canny lawyer who was the engineer of the superb contract that brought Welles to RKO in the first place, and who had saved his bacon more than once. Welles’s personal finances were looking shaky: Weissberger was having difficulty in raising royalties on Native Son; the Internal Revenue Service was about to move on the Mercury Theatre’s outstanding Social Security contributions, as well as Welles’s back taxes. ‘A three-fold attack by the State, the Federal government against you personally and the Federal government against the Mercury, would not be a very good idea at this time.’9 The spread in L
ife magazine had been valuable, Weissberger says, but urges him to get Herb Drake to engender some publicity ‘to counteract the flood of rumours about your relations with RKO’. Apart from an equivocal Phil Reismann and a deeply embattled George Schaefer (who had relented to the extent of authorising a final final allocation of $30,000 to complete shooting on It’s All True), Welles was without support in Hollywood. Koerner’s RKO was close to washing its hands of him, and his operation in Rio was grinding to a halt. A crowing Lynn Shores laconically wired Walter Daniels of the front office: OUT OF FILM AND OUT OF MONEY.10

  It was at exactly that point that Jacaré drowned. There have been innumerable conflicting versions of the events of 19 May; what follows is drawn directly from the daily report, under the usual heading, WELLES ACTIVITIES. Its veracity can scarcely be doubted, and nothing so well conveys the immediacy and horror of what happened. At 7.30 a.m. on the Tuesday morning, the report states, the unit went to the location at Barra Da Tijuca: there was a heavy mist, so the jangada was tied to the launch with two ropes. All four jangadeiros rode on the raft as it was towed into Guanabara Bay and past the spot chosen for the day’s shooting. For some reason, Jacaré ordered the launch to go still further; despite the mist, people on shore could see what was happening and tried to attract the jangadeiros’ attention, to get them to stop. Welles ordered two of the drivers to go ahead and signal to them, which they did by taking their shirts off and waving them; seeing this, Jacaré ordered the captain of the launch to approach the coast. At exactly that moment, a tremendous breaker caught the launch and the tow lines broke, freeing the jangada, which rolled over. Two of the jangadeiros, Jeronimo and Jacaré, started to swim to the shore. The other two, Tátá and Manuel Preto, stayed close to the raft, and managed to turn it upright. Jeronimo caught hold of the jangada’s rudder and, since he was nearest, the other two pulled him aboard. They heard Jacaré’s calls for help, but by the time they went to look for him, he was gone. A second breaker righted the launch and the captain took it out of danger, whereupon the drivers took off their shoes and dived in; the jangada turned over again, and once more the jangadeiros were thrown into the water. The chauffeurs pulled the three surviving jangadeiros out of the water by rope; they were taken to Joá, and the drivers returned to tell Welles and the company what had happened. Lynn Shores and Dick Wilson were also informed, and they called the harbour police. Welles returned with the three jangadeiros to the Filumense clube and then to the Palace Hotel, and spent the rest of the day with various newspapermen in conferences with Assis Figuereido, Phil Reismann, Lynn Shores, Dick Wilson, Bob Meltzer and Fernando Pinto, president of the jangada clube in Fortaleza. The mood was sombre: death had come to the party.