Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  Welles devoted his allotted fortnight to cleaning up the final reels of Journey into Fear, this cliff-hanging sequence, as Banat pursues his quarry across the rain-spattered facade of the hotel, remains the most successful in the film. It is impossible to tell what Welles might have achieved with the movie had he been given a proper post-production period: again, with the dissolution of his team, he was effectively working with one hand tied behind his back. The contribution that might have been made by special effects and an interesting (as opposed to merely generic) score was potentially enormous: had Bernard Herrmann, for example, an absolute master of suspense and exotic effects, written it rather than poor old Roy Webb, he might have taken the film to a different level of finish and wit. As it is, Webb did a decent workmanlike job; it is honourably competent, the last thing one expects or wants from a Welles film. At least one executive at RKO had faith in it: Al Galston of the sales department sent a telegram to Welles saying: WE BELIEVE YOUR REVISED JOURNEY INTO FEAR WILL BE ONE OF THE BIG BOX OFFICE GROSSERS OF THE YEAR.12 Alas, it was not to be.

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  Whatever the ill will between Welles and RKO, Hollywood at large had not dismissed him; he was still a huge figure in the landscape. But what to do with him? In 1942, the producer David O. Selznick was planning another of his grandiose literary adaptations; unlike his recent triumphs, Gone with the Wind (1939) and Rebecca (1940), this one was to be drawn from a truly great source, Jane Eyre. He decided that Welles should play Jane’s moody employer, Edward Rochester. Welles had known the producer since they had dined together after a performance of Doctor Faustus in 1936, when Selznick had offered him the job of head of his story department (Welles slyly suggested that his then business partner, John Houseman, might be better at it). As was his wont, Selznick sought to throw every particle of talent he could muster at the project. Jane Eyre was the dream of the English-born director Robert Stevenson, who had been under contract to Selznick for some time without actually making a film for him. His biggest success in America had been Tom Brown’s Schooldays; he had just completed a decent and financially productive French Resistance movie, Joan of Paris, for RKO, and was preparing to join the Forces himself as soon as Jane Eyre was shot. Selznick had equipped him with an army of writers, including Aldous Huxley and John Houseman, now indeed (just as Welles had suggested he should be seven years before) part of Selznick’s permanent staff.

  Selznick was not, in fact, technically speaking, the producer of Jane Eyre: having packaged the film, he had sold it to Twentieth Century Fox, who appointed William ‘Bill’ Goetz – another son-in-law, like Selznick himself, of Louis B. Mayer – as producer, but Selznick kept a sharp eye on the production from beginning to end. It was Selznick’s idea to cast Orson Welles as Edward Rochester to Joan Fontaine’s Jane; he may have hoped that some of Welles’s genius would rub off on Stevenson. Such was his regard for Welles’s work as a director that he had begged RKO to deposit a copy of Welles’s original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a tantalising prospect that, needless to say, never materialised. Selznick had long admired him as an actor and thought him, with some reason, peerless as a director of dramatised novels on radio; he had vexed Alfred Hitchcock during preparations for Rebecca by constantly referring to the version of the novel that Welles had just made for The Campbell Playhouse: ‘if we do in motion pictures as astute a job as Welles did on the radio,’ he had told Hitch in one of his celebrated memos, ‘we are likely to have the same success the book had and the same success that Welles had.’13

  From Welles’s point of view, Jane Eyre was from the start a questionable enterprise, compromising as it did his status as a so-called quadruple-threat. His profile as producer-director-writer-actor had been perceived by his advisors (and to an extent by him) as being the sine qua non of his reputation. In the end, financial considerations – the money he owed RKO, his alimony, his tax arrears, the extravagance of his lifestyle – demanded that he accept the job, but he and his representatives did everything they could to protect his position. Anxious that Welles might be mistaken for a mere actor, Herb Drake told Look magazine that Welles was only doing Jane Eyre ‘in the interest of Uncle Sam’s tax department’, demonstrating a dangerous contempt for acting on Welles’s part. Perhaps Welles thought that by affecting to despise his job, he would win public sympathy; the opposite is invariably true, as in the case of Marlon Brando’s similar statements of some twenty years later. Why should anybody want to pay money to see someone do something for which they have contempt? Welles’s attorney Loyd Wright took issue with Twentieth Century Fox’s proposed contract, insisting that ‘he must not deviate from his well-earned position, that of a recognised independent producer’, even if he was only to act in the film, and had nothing whatsoever to do with its physical realisation.14 Wright suggested a credit for him: PRODUCTION DESIGNED BY ORSON WELLES. Merely acting in a film was clearly regarded by Welles and his team as a dire demotion: how could he, who had done every job on a movie, simply take direction from some lesser mortal?

  Selznick was aware of the anomaly and, when he wrote to Goetz telling him that he’d like to be present at a forthcoming casting meeting for Jane Eyre, he added, ‘I should like also to urge you to have Orson there, because I know few people in the history of the business who have shown such talent for exact casting, and for digging up new people.’15 There was from the beginning some confusion about exactly what Welles would be doing on the film, a confusion that Welles did nothing to dispel. This was a pattern that would be repeated many times throughout his career: the creation of a suspicion that he might have had something of a guiding hand in the realisation of another director’s film. In the case of Jane Eyre, the impression is even more insistent because, in addition to the casting of three of Welles’s actors – Erskine Sanford, Eustace Wyatt and the great Agnes Moorehead – two of his key collaborators worked on the film: Bernard Herrmann (a great deal of the music, as it happens, is recycled from Herrmann’s score for Welles’s radio version of Rebecca); and, no doubt to Welles’s considerable displeasure, John Houseman. In the event, Houseman – to the relief of both himself and Welles – was not present at any point during either filming or the pre-production period.

  There was an active move on Welles’s part, or that of his representatives, to secure a formal credit for him as producer of Jane Eyre, a move that Selznick equally actively resisted. ‘I don’t believe Orson himself would any more think of taking this credit, once he had all the facts and understood what he might be doing to Stevenson, than he would think of taking directing or co-directing credit,’ he wrote to Goetz. ‘Actually, direction or co-direction credit would be no more damaging to Stevenson in this case than production credit for Orson, for the latter places Stevenson in the position of simply having carried out Orson’s plans, than which nothing could be more inaccurate.’ Selznick had already conceded Welles first billing over Joan Fontaine (an undisputed star since Rebecca), because an acting-only credit would ‘reduce’ him from his status as a producer-director-actor-writer. For him to have associate producer status would thus be ‘a double injustice – to Stevenson, and to Joan’s status as a star of the first magnitude … I do not think that he will want anything that is not his due, at the expense of another man for whom he has professed – very sincerely, I am sure – great admiration.’ Interestingly, only a few weeks after sending this to Goetz, Selznick wrote to Joe Schenck of Twentieth Century in very different terms, agreeing to Welles receiving credit as producer, while Fontaine gets first billing. Among the various practical reasons he cites, there is, he says, ‘general disbelief’ that they would not give first billing to Fontaine, ceding second billing ‘to a man who, whatever his prestige, is clearly not in the same category as a star’.16 Conversely, it was thought absurd to lose the prestige of Welles’s name as producer in the credits; in their eyes, his stature was clearly unaffected by the RKO debacle. Stevenson, Selznick continued, was going into the army, so Wel
les’s credit would not damage him; the publicity department, meanwhile, had reported that ‘there can be no wide-spread belief that Mr Stevenson is not the director of the film in every sense of the word’. So much for appearances. More significantly from Welles’s perspective, Selznick reports that they have just learned that ‘Welles did a great more producing on the picture than we had previously known. We have been informed by people from your studio that Mr Welles worked on the sets, changes in the script, in casting, among other things, and that he had charge of the editing.’

  All of this is extraordinary, but what is conveyed by the last phrase (my italics) is simply sensational. To edit another man’s movie is to cut his balls off, as Welles had better reason than most to know – to edit creatively, that is, rather than merely functionally. In the technical sense, moreover, at this point Welles was scarcely the master of editing that he later became, having only directed Citizen Kane (largely edited in the camera) and The Magnificent Ambersons (on which Welles’s editing contribution amounted to precisely three days – and nights – in Miami). And yet: he had charge of the editing. The letter ends: ‘please understand that we are in no sense pressing this [the suggestion that Welles should receive a credit as producer], and are extending it purely as a courtesy to 20th Century-Fox’. For whatever reasons, it never happened: Welles received no producer credit, and he had to settle for second billing to the star.

  On the set, however, he hardly comported himself as a mere actor, according to Joan Fontaine’s perhaps not entirely objective account. ‘Orson Welles was a huge man in 1943. Everything about him was oversize, including his ego,’ she wrote in her autobiography, No Bed of Roses. ‘Orson’s concern was entirely for Orson: Jane Eyre was simply a medium to show off his talents.’ She describes how, on the first day of filming, the cast and crew were assembled at one o’clock; at about four, the stage door suddenly burst open and Welles whirled in, accompanied by his doctor, his manager, his secretary and his valet. ‘Orson strode up to a lectern … placing his script on it and standing before our astonished group, he announced to the director and cast, “Now we’ll begin on page four!”’ Stevenson – ‘slight, timid, gentlemanly’ – was ‘suddenly demoted to director-in-name-only’. The journalist Sheilah Graham wrote a profile of Welles during the making of the film, in the course of which she reported that ‘Welles has four secretaries, two offices, and is making a government “short” in between takes of Jane Eyre. At the same time he is scripting one broadcast a week and cutting Journey into Fear. Also.’ she added, with casual savagery, ‘he is directing the director of Jane Eyre on how to direct.’

  It is worth noting that at this stage Welles had never been directed by anyone else on film – indeed, he had hardly been directed by anyone else in any medium, at least since his youthful days at the Gate and the slightly later period with Katharine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic. It must have been a hard adjustment for him, one that he did not handle with grace. It signals the beginning of his essentially awkward relationship with the film community: if you hired him as an actor, you got so much more – more perhaps than you wanted. It is fair to observe that, in this particular case (perhaps unbeknown to Fontaine), he had been involved in both the screenplay and the casting, so it is hardly surprising that he expected to be treated differently from everyone else. But this behaviour (no doubt exaggerated by Fontaine, though there are plenty of comparable reports, then and later) suggests a childish determination to demonstrate his importance. It also marks the beginning of the long sulk that so often coloured his work in other men’s films: they won’t let him make his own movies, so he’s damned if anyone else is going to enjoy making theirs.

  This attitude was not, however, inflexibly maintained: ‘Orson couldn’t keep up to the position he assumed,’ wrote Fontaine. ‘He was undisciplined, always late, indulged in melodrama on and off the set.’ On one occasion he failed to show up on time for a photo-shoot: ‘He’d been lying in the bath sulking because I didn’t trust him to show up on time.’ This aspect of Welles – the infantile tyrant – is widely attested, and coexists with the passionate and high-flown broadcaster, the political writer, the master-craftsman and the inspiring leader. They were all Welles, and the different personae could succeed each other with bewildering speed, or could indeed be on display simultaneously. At the time, Welles was having an affair with Lena Horne, who was singing in a nightclub on Sunset Strip, and he liked to report his wilder activities to Fontaine while they were shooting. (Shorty Chirello, Welles’s chauffeur-valet, confided in her that in fact Welles sat in bed every night with a tray, ‘which didn’t jibe at all with Orson’s version of his nocturnal exploits’. For once, Welles’s version of his own life may be more reliable than his chauffeur’s.) Despite everything, Fontaine realised, he wanted to be liked. Eventually she warmed to him. Moreover, she noted that, despite all Welles’s peacock displays, Stevenson quietly and slowly regained the directorial reins. With filming completed, however, he joined the army and Welles was presumably able to assert his authority in the editing suite.

  Whatever the truth of this, the film – though certainly dominated by Welles’s startling interpretation of the character of Edward Rochester – is not especially Wellesian in style; indeed, to a large extent it is actually opposed to his aesthetic. The very opening of the film, showing a bookshelf laden with great tomes of the past, proudly declares itself a literary adaptation, which might be thought to have been anathema to the radical educationalist in Welles. The film ends with a photograph of a bound copy of the novel with the slogan ‘Buy yours in the theatre’. The cinema as a route to literature, not an art form in its own right. If Welles stood against anything as a movie-maker, that was it. The cinematography, by the distinguished cameraman George Barnes (who had just shot Rebecca for Hitchcock), is of great refinement of tone, softly focused, evocative and painterly in a way that Welles and Toland – formerly Barnes’s assistant – had utterly set themselves against in Citizen Kane; The Magnificent Ambersons, too, though aspiring to a period look, uses depth of focus and a kind of energy in the camera movements to engage the viewer critically with the way in which the story is being told. Barnes’s work in Jane Eyre, by contrast, contrives to create a world in which the viewer can forget that he or she is watching a film and simply marvel at the expressive beauty of the pictures. In his own films, Welles did everything he could to prevent this. It is not a style ideally suited to Welles’s talents as a performer. Indeed, it may be argued that Welles’s acting is always at its best with the cinematographic style that came to be associated with his name – one of unexpected angles, sudden distortions, epic perspectives (the style Carol Reed adopted for The Third Man, in which Welles gives arguably his finest performance). The performance he chooses to give in Jane Eyre is on the brink of the grotesque, in much the same manner as his aged Kane: curiously doll-like, strapped into corsets, a great beak of a nose imposed on his own, his facial skin pulled back by the gum of his wig. Interestingly, the image he creates is not unlike the one he invented for himself as a thirteen-year-old playing Richard III. He wears the make-up, which reproduces Brontë’s ‘stern features and a heavy brow … gathered eyebrows’, like a mask, affecting a highly theatrical, consciously stentorian vocal delivery; his British accent is not that of an English squire, but of an English actor (sometimes tipping over into the lordly Anglo-Irish tones of his youth in the Dublin theatre); it is part of a theatrical gesture. His Rochester is an impersonation, not an interpretation; with Welles, the outside never goes in.

  This is by no means to say that the performance is uninteresting: on the contrary, Welles sees the character as a kind of tortured monster, physically strange, clumsy, only half-human. It is exactly the sort of line on the character that another actor, Charles Laughton, might have taken. Had Laughton done so, he might well have created an equally extreme physical life, but he would (at his best) have transfigured the portrait, touching some universal chord, provoking pity as well as terror, giv
ing us the man within. With Welles, the interpretation is an idea, put on (like a suit of armour), very striking, very powerful, but merely a thing manipulated by the actor, and thus incapable of moving us. It betrays, as much of his acting does, the influence of German Expressionism, the most theatrical of all filmic styles. This, his first conscious bid for movie stardom, was not a promising calling card; the gesture is so extreme that he only suffers by comparison with the rest of the acting in the film, which in its straightforwardly realistic manner is excellent, ranging from the childish charms of Elizabeth Taylor and the remarkable skill of the teenage Peggy Ann Garner (as the young Jane), through the stalwart and strikingly accurate character work of Henry Daniell and the human warmth of the Abbey Theatre veteran Sarah Allgood, to the uptight vulnerability of Joan Fontaine in one of her best roles. In this company Welles seems distinctly out of place. So, it might be argued, is Edward Rochester, but Welles’s massive presence and anguished histrionics have a distinctly unbalancing effect on the film. Jane Eyre was not released till 1944, a long year after Journey into Fear finally hit the screen in February of 1943; as far as the public was concerned, they scarcely knew what to make of him as an actor. Up to that point Orson Welles’s performances on film had consisted of the many-faceted but not necessarily many-layered Charles Foster Kane, and the preposterously corny Colonel Haki. The release of Jane Eyre as something of a moment of truth for him as an actor.