Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  Welles moodily told Robert Stevenson that the notices he received for the performance had been ‘the worst accorded to an American actor since John Wilkes Booth’.17 On the whole, in fact, the reviews were baffled, as well they might have been, though respectfully so. The Hollywood Reporter detected ‘certain over-emphases that are occasionally offensively flamboyant and approximate’,18 while Variety noted Welles’s ‘declamatory delivery’.19 Only James Agee in the Nation really took the gloves off, describing Welles’s ‘road-operatic sculpturings of body, cloak and diction, his eyes glinting in the Rembrandt gloom, at every chance, like side-orders of jelly.20 It is possible to enjoy his performance as dead-pan parody; I imagine he did.’ Unkindly, Agee adds that he might have enjoyed it himself, ‘if I hadn’t wanted, instead, to see a good performance’.

  Friends were not much more supportive. Welles was not encouraged by receipt of a telegram from Micheál macLiammóir praising him for his performance of Mr Rochester as Count Dracula, though that sharp little sally has a bit more in it than pure malice: Welles’s performance is indeed in his line of tortured monsters, of which his radio Dracula is the most remarkable. The problem is that his desire to provoke pity is a notion, an intellectual ambition: he does not take the steps necessary to effect it in the viewer, such as connecting with his own experience or allowing his imagination to engage at a deep (as opposed to a merely pictorial) level. Welles defended himself on curious grounds: ‘There are about eight or nine parts that every individual actor can really play and the Rochester role is one of my eight or nine,’ he told an interviewer.21 ‘I don’t agree with those sedulous character actors who study and “live” a role for seven months in advance of playing it. If they have to work at it that long, it’s a sure thing they aren’t fitted for it. They can only … detract from the true possibilities of the role … if the role doesn’t fit the actor then he’s false no matter if he lived it 100 hours a day, and no matter how great his talent for mimicry. I’m striking a blow for realism.’ Realism was not a characteristic that either the press or the public were much inclined then – or ever – to associate with the name of Orson Welles, and his comment suggests that self-knowledge continued to elude him.

  As Welles had admitted, acting in film was a minor element in his life, which was stirring in all sorts of other directions. Many of these departures had considerable significance for his immediate and not-so-immediate future. Whatever his success or failure in any one arena, the scale of Welles’s celebrity was such that new ventures were always easy to come by, new spheres always waiting to be conquered. Leonard Lyons, his old admirer on the New York Post, asked him to write a guest column for the paper, and Welles obliged with gauche charm. ‘This may be the last time I write a column, but it isn’t the first.’22 In the piece he recounts the – largely true – story of his infant journalism, when he was the eight-year-old opera critic for the Highland Park News. Then he tells a sweet, if slightly less convincing, story about his time as ghost writer for a drunken movie critic ‘in a city which shall be nameless – and a newspaper which should be’. He wrote the reviews, he says, never having seen the movies in question. Then one day the movie didn’t show up, but his review came out nonetheless. He claims, too, to have written pulp fiction in Ireland – ‘I never was much good at it; it’s a great art’ – and rounds the piece off with a long and somewhat inconclusive story about Edgar Wallace, which feels like padding, adding, as a final tag, a teary compliment to Leonard Lyons for writing about him ‘when I needed it’. Pleasant enough stuff, but not promising for a future as a columnist. The tone of voice is archly orotund, like a well-oiled after-dinner speaker (‘Memory’s treasure trove yields up another wistful bauble in the episode of …’). No doubt the piece served its purpose – a stopgap while the resident columnist was on holiday – but it scarcely suggested a future in column writing. Before long, however, that is exactly what Welles pursued with almost desperate fervour.

  For the present, he was immersed in another novel enterprise, substituting for an indisposed Jack Benny on his eponymous show. Welles’s passion for vaudeville in general, and comedians in particular, was one of the great constants of his life: in the late 1960s he was to be found happily fooling around in front of a camera with some of the bright young things of British comedy of the day, Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor. It was a taste he had acquired in childhood as he trailed around the vaudeville houses of Chicago with his stage-door Johnny father. To his unconcealed delight, in March of 1940 – a full year before Citizen Kane was released – Welles had been invited to be the guest star on Benny’s show. He plunges into the proceedings like a great big dog jumping into a river and emerging, dripping but triumphant, with a stick between its jaws. He is hugely game and quite fearless, cracking himself up shamelessly and stumbling charmingly over his script. He is not especially funny, but he is utterly engaging. The persona created for him in the show is an exact reflection of the public’s perception of him at the time: precocious (he left high school at five, Benny says: even his diapers had cuffs) and extravagant, a sort of deranged actor-managerial-megalomaniac. He runs three careers simultaneously, and sounds veddy, veddy British, dictating notes on several topics to his various secretaries – a private one and another who is ‘right out in the open’ – speaking to London on the phone while being measured by his fussy tailor. Benny and the rest of the team constantly refer to the Welles legend (‘scared anyone today, Orson?’). The plot of the episode concerns Benny’s dream of being a great actor, to realise which he takes lessons from Welles (‘with his technique and my feeling for the finer things, I could really go places’). Welles duly rehearses Benny in a scene from The Hunchback of Notre Dame – in the film of which, as it happens, Charles Laughton had recently had an overwhelming success, playing the part originally offered to Welles – and this gives Welles a chance to do his brilliantly observed and extremely funny impersonation of the very grand Sir Cedric Hardwicke (Frollo in the movie). It’s all high-spirited and droll, with Welles bearing the brunt of most of the jokes.

  Since this romp, three years earlier, Welles’s career had experienced spectacular vicissitudes; Benny, meanwhile, remained (as he had been for nearly a decade) the biggest radio star in America, and probably the world. His show was built around the minutely detailed character he had invented for himself – musically incompetent, curmudgeonly, prissy verging on camp – and he played his live audience like the violin he was supposedly incapable of mastering, with freedom, elegance and hair’s-breadth timing. (The most famous and best-loved of his exchanges involved Benny being held up by a robber. ‘Your money or your life’, the robber demands. Long silence from Benny, which provokes a huge laugh from the audience. When it eventually subsides, the robber repeats his demand. Another even longer laughter-filled pause from Benny, who finally says, ‘I’m thinking it over.’) Every part of the exchange depends on the audience’s familiarity with the Benny persona, whose very facial expressions the listeners could vividly imagine. The idea of actually standing in for this comic genius, as opposed to simply making a guest appearance on his show, would have been nerve-rackingly daunting to anyone with an iota of self-doubt. It is a considerable tribute to Welles that Benny was prepared to entrust the show to him (with the sponsor, Grapenuts, clearly being equally confident in his abilities), and a measure of Welles’s fearlessness and supreme self-confidence that he accepted the invitation at all.

  In the five shows in which he deputes for Benny, Welles acquires Benny’s entourage, including the outrageous black manservant Rochester, but of course plays himself – or rather, as before, the public perception of himself. It is startling how much older he seems than in his earlier incarnation of only three years earlier. The crisp, brisk, flamboyance of the 1940 ‘Orson Welles’, precocious actor-manager, has been replaced by a rather sombre, moody figure, pompous and tyrannical: The Genius. ‘Quiet on the set!’23 one of the characters regularly exclaims, ‘Mr Welles is about to Direct!’ – or
Explain! – or Emote! Benny’s normally frisky entourage is cowed into servility, swiftly silenced if they make a suggestion of any sort, and reduced to monosyllables in the sections when they act in the film that ‘Mr Welles’ is purportedly making. ‘I call my film quite simply The March of Destiny,’ ‘Mr Welles’ says, ‘and it deals with everything that ever happened.’ There is immense emphasis on his genius: ‘Phil,’ he tells one of his henchmen, ‘you’re a genius, and I ought to know.’ But genius evidently has its disadvantages. ‘Sometimes,’ he muses gloomily, ‘I wish I weren’t perfect, so people could differ with me.’ He performs a striking and elaborate send-up of the standard commercial plug for Grapenuts with epic grandiosity, but whichever way you slice it, it’s still a plug. The studio audience is obediently appreciative, though naturally there are none of the huge extended laughs that Benny regularly coaxed out of his audiences. Part of the problem is that, unlike the Jack Benny character, which is preposterous and bears no relation to the real man or his career, this ‘Orson Welles’ is uncomfortably close to the real one: are we laughing at or with him? It sometimes feels self-serving. At least one person of considerable influence, however, was very impressed. After the first show in which Welles deputised for Benny, William S. Paley (boss of CBS) telegrammed him to say: NOW THAT YOU HAVE QUALIFIED AS A COMEDIAN OF NO MEAN STATURE WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN DOING YOUR OWN COMEDY SHOW ON A REGULAR WEEKLY BASIS.24 It was some time before this new idea came to fruition, but the seed was sown.

  While edging towards comedy, Welles had by no means abandoned his more serious ambitions for radio, and did not hesitate to advance his radical political views. ‘I know that you agree with me that radio has a very definite responsibility in the matter of the current race riots,’ he wrote, as a member of a committee of Writers’ Mobilisation, to Davidson Taylor at CBS, ‘and the growing tension in many of the industrial communities between black and white, whites and Mexicans and other minority groups.’25 He was trying to persuade the company to produce a script called Snowball, written, as it happens, by Howard Koch, with whom he was now back in partnership, despite the rupture of their relationship over Welles’s claims to have written the script for The War of the Worlds broadcast, though Koch was unquestionably its author. For Snowball, Welles had assembled the talented cast of Gary Cooper, Jo Cotten, Canada Lee, Walter Huston ‘and your obt. servt.’. Taylor’s reply presaged a long and ultimately frustrated struggle on Welles’s part to put race relations at the centre of public debate. CBS had broadcast an Open Letter on ‘the Negro Problem’, which had been very successful. But, Taylor tells Welles, ‘You may not know the difficulties it caused.’26

  The issue of race, despite the extraordinary advances achieved by the National Association for the Promotion of Colored Peoples, was still, in America in 1943 and for many years to come, an explosive one; courage and tenacity were called for even to raise the matter. Welles had both qualities in overplus, and no lack of candour – not always of the most diplomatic variety. Taylor says that he’ll consult their educational advisor, Lyman Bryson, to which Welles replies:

  Mr Bryson and I are not strangers.27 We keep bumping into each other on the platforms of women’s clubs, and for your friendly ear I can’t help but remark that this ‘Director of Education Department’ speaks, like Gratiano, ‘an infinite deal of nothing’. He is persuasive in Lyman Bryson’s behalf, and cosily certain of the success of his moral crusade within CBS. He has mastered the fashionable idioms of the intellectual caste and exhibits everywhere that sort of sprightly serenity so often confused with open-mindedness. I shudder to think that this dollar-book scholar, this luncheon sage, is the man to decide whether the negro problem is to get another half hour on the network. But then this is a world to shudder in – Burn this. Fond regards.

  The object of Welles’s contempt wrote a letter to him shortly afterwards, saying, not unreasonably, that ‘We cannot with much hope of success do two smashes on the same question so close together if we hope to carry the network along with us.’28 They are anxious, he insists, ‘above all to use broadcasting to the very limit of its social value’, but explains that they simply cannot get the affiliated stations to carry the programmes. ‘We are hoping to attack other social questions dramatically and to increase the willingness on the part of the general public to face these difficult and violent matters with reasonableness.’ The solution is time and patience. This would not do for Welles, whose admirable passion in the matter – in any matter about which he felt strongly – could not tolerate a softly-softly approach: his gut inclination was to storm the citadel. In the end, this would prove to be his undoing as a political figure, resulting in fireworks, certainly, but not the general conflagration he so ardently desired.

  Welles was accepting more and more invitations to speak publicly. The war was the inevitable theme, often within the context of broadcasting or the movies. He spoke loftily and passionately, using all the skills of rhetoric that were central to his own acting, allowing his extraordinary vocal instrument free rein, and his audiences were greatly stirred. At first, he spoke as any committed actor might have spoken, with more ardour than analysis, appealing principally to the emotions: ‘I am sorry to have been advertised as a speaker,’ he said when he appeared with Charles Chaplin at a meeting billed ‘Artists’ Front to Win the War’.29 ‘I have nothing to say to you which you don’t know … but I am here on this platform and I’m speaking to you because I must: because even if I’m not the best man for the job, there isn’t anyone in these United States who hasn’t the right to speak up about the war.’ This is Orson as Everyman, a favourite manifestation of his. ‘As it happens we approve of our leadership. We endorse it … this isn’t a protest meeting … finally this is a people’s war – on all fronts – a people’s war and we’re all in it. Just that.’ Later, he spoke more articulately and with more precision, addressing the Adult Education Conference on the subject of ‘New Techniques in Mass Education’: ‘All educators, whether they like it or not, are in the amusement business, and all movie makers and radio broadcasters are educators,’ he told the conference.30 ‘In this shrinking new world of ours, adult education must first enlist in the war against provincialism. Exactly as long as the proposition that all men are created equal is a faith real enough for men to die for it, educators, which means every one of us in possession of the instruments of education, are sworn to the tremendous task of telling people about each other – about their works which are called wisdom and culture.’ His commitment to pan-Americanism was undiluted. It was, he insisted, ‘a requisite for our victory … and making the dream of inter-American unity come true is less a job for diplomatists than it is for educators. The United Nations are fighting for a united mankind …’ Narrowing his scope, he describes, as an example of the educational value of celluloid, the possibility of filming – for the benefit of medical students – great surgeons performing operations; then he expands again into a resounding peroration: ‘with the present development of communications, I don’t think there will be a spot on the globe that will long be what we now call remote. There will be no more frontiers. The new elements of mass education will be to the dark places of the human mind as bright sunlight is to the crawling things under a lifted stone. The vermin and bacteria of intolerance cannot survive in the bright gleaming light of understanding.’ He knows, he says, that he sounds as though he is talking about the millennium: ‘I am, and I believe that it has a very good chance of happening in your lifetime or mine.’

  The speech was a great success, and there were many requests for a transcript. One letter told him that ‘We admired tremendously your broad views and complete understanding of the problems of adult education and your very practical theories for solving them.’31 He was clearly possessed by the idea that fundamental change in society was a real possibility; the thinking of the Popular Front informs his every phrase. Welles had been radicalised; politicisation was not far behind. It is worth noting here that if it is a little unusua
l for a movie director or actor of his stature to have appeared in radio comedies, or to have written popular columns for tabloids, it is virtually unheard of for one to have become an orator of a decidedly political bent while remaining a practising artist. The political community was delighted: his celebrity would be a tremendous boost to their appeal. Both his endorsement and his oratory were widely sought by the many committees and councils, anti-fascist, pro-second front, pro-labour, pro-education, to which the war had given a new sense of relevance. He was so much in demand that he sometimes felt hounded. On one occasion he wrote to a certain Helen Bryan, who had reproached him for cancelling an appearance, that ‘stage and screen performers of progressive persuasion are so frequently exploited that many of them have been forced into retreat or at least political seclusion.32 I hope I am made of somewhat sterner stuff, but I understand the attitude of these men and women and after our “misunderstanding” I must confess it is a temptation to sympathise with them.’

  In reality, retreat or political seclusion was not an option for Welles in 1943. On the contrary, the scope of his public utterances was getting wider. At a rally at the Lewisohn Stadium in Upper Manhattan, his fellow-speakers were Paul Robeson and Roosevelt’s Vice-President, Henry Wallace, no less. Welles gave an address with the resonant title ‘Moral Indebtedness’.

  My part in this free meeting is just this: it is to say that to be born free is to be born in debt; to live in freedom without fighting slavery is to profiteer.33 By plane last night I flew over some parts of our republic where American citizenship is a luxury beyond the means of a majority. I rode comfortably in my plane above a sovereign state or two where fellow countrymen of ours can’t vote without the privilege of cash. Today I bought my lunch where Negroes may not come, except to serve their white brothers, and there I overheard a member of some master race or other tell those who listened that something must be done to suppress the Jews. I have met Southerners who expect and fear a Negro insurrection. I see no purpose in withholding this from general discussion. There may be those within that outcast 10 per cent of the American people who someday will strike back at their oppressors. To put down the mob, a mob would rise. Who will put down that mob?