Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  As a final slap in the face to Cohn (and Hollywood in general), on 7 September 1943, in a highly co-ordinated operation, he snatched Rita Hayworth away from the Columbia lot between scenes of Cover Girl, to get married in a local church. It was a tiny and very private ceremony. Dadda Bernstein and his wife Hazel were there; Joseph Cotten was best man; and the second Mrs Welles was back at Columbia before anyone had noticed her absence. When he did find out, Harry Cohn’s rage was terrible, but there was nothing he could do. He exacted some petty revenge some years later, when he, Welles and Hayworth worked together; he had, just this once, been outsmarted, but in the end he held all the power and he knew it. Welles’s high-spirited defiance made little impact on him, nor indeed on Hollywood in general. Welles was still the resident enfant terrible, from whom bad behaviour was positively expected; he was a colourful part of the landscape, but no longer a significant figure.

  His profile in Hollywood at the time is perfectly embodied in the only film in which he was involved in more than eighteen months, which captures something of the charm of The Mercury Wonder Show, though little of its anarchy. Follow the Boys, directed by Eddie Sutherland, was a wartime morale-raiser whose gung-ho working title had been Three Cheers for the Boys. Patriotic it may have been, but it was scarcely a charitable venture: Welles earned $30,000 for his five days’ work; George Raft, the link-man, earned $100,000 dollars, a cool sum for 1944. The film’s framework must have been highly congenial to Welles: it starts on the very last night of big-time vaudeville on the stage of the about-to-be demolished Palace Theatre in New York, and traces the determined effort of a member of one of the acts (George Raft), rejected on physical grounds from enlisting, to make his contribution to the war. Welles is first seen at a mass-meeting of film-workers, sitting among his fellow-actors and entertainers, patiently waiting to learn how they can help the war effort. ‘I’m an amateur magician,’ Welles pipes up, modestly, ‘perhaps I can help.’ He is next seen on a film set in Hollywood being called on the phone by George Raft. The call goes through to a man working on top of a telegraph pole. A bravura, comically over-the-top Wellesian overhead shot shows Welles himself and his many bustling assistants from the phone’s point of view; the instrument is then tossed down to him; he takes the call with modest and witty charm and we cut to the theatre where the performance takes place. First a rabbit appears, then a puff of smoke, then Welles, dapper in tails, cigar in mouth: ‘That’s the first time you’ve ever seen a rabbit produce a magician,’ he says. There is much play with the cigar, which appears to be floating; a flock of pigeons is produced from behind a paper screen. At this point, Marlene Dietrich appears in silhouette behind the screen, smoking a cigarette. As she emerges, Welles announces that she’ll be sawn in half and asks for volunteers to do the sawing; half the audience of GIs rushes forward. ‘Orson,’ says Dietrich with every indication of barely suppressed panic, ‘we haven’t rehearsed this. How does it work?’ Welles: ‘Don’t worry, it’ll kill you.’ He hums extravagantly as the men saw away at her; he produces a cigar from behind a volunteer’s ear, then lights it from a light bulb, which he tosses over his shoulder. He seems unnaturally energised. Finally, the men finish sawing. To her alarm, Miss Dietrich’s legs stand up and walk away from the rest of her; she then gets them back again. ‘How do I know they’re mine?’ she asks. ‘Don’t worry,’ says Welles, ‘I’ll hypnotise them.’ He and she lock eyeballs; he faints. End of sequence.

  It is an episode of great appeal, Welles in particular being at his most elegant and droll; it is almost as if the young Charles Foster Kane were performing the act. Of course, it bears little resemblance to what was done on stage in The Mercury Wonder Show itself – quite rightly. The possibilities of the medium are used in a way that would have gladdened Jean Cocteau’s heart, satisfying the fascination with vaudeville, magic and illusion that the Frenchman shared with Welles. It is to be presumed that Eddie Sutherland, a man of unpretentious expertise, would at the very least have consulted Welles as to how best to realise the scene, which has an elegance and a wit not be found in the rest of a solidly enjoyable film, which seamlessly weaves together what seems to be an irreconcilably diverse array of talents including Dinah Shore and W. C. Fields, Artur Rubinstein and Leonard Gautier’s Bricklayers. The film displays towards Welles an affectionate sense of his youthful extravagance and absurdity, a wry enjoyment of his roguish, boyish ways. It is scarcely a portrait of the director of the most explosively original film ever to have come out of Hollywood, the central figure in a fight to the death between himself and a studio. Follow the Boys shows a well-loved Hollywood character, with Welles playing the part of a swashbuckling director-laddie.

  There was at present no prospect of his actually directing anything. He continued in a fairly desultory way to pursue War and Peace, wiring Korda: AS YOU KNOW I HAVE BEEN SERIOUSLY ILL SO IT’S JUST AS WELL I DIDN’T SPEND THE LAST THREE MONTHS IN WARTIME LONDON BUT AM VERY MUCH ON THE MEND THOUGH DOING RADIO TO PAY THE BILLS WAR AND PEACE REMAINS MY CHIEF, INDEED, MY ONLY AMBITION.18 He urges Korda to help Rita Hayworth with her permit to travel with him to London and Moscow; but when that was not forthcoming, he finally gave up on the project, as he publicly announced to Hedda Hopper in a rare interview with her around the time of his birthday (his twenty-ninth). Years later he told his biographer Barbara Leaming that he had written a full screenplay of the novel, but that Korda was not serious about it: he simply wanted to have an office at Metro. For neither of these propositions is there any evidence. Meanwhile he was, as he had told Korda, working in radio again, again pursuing the ignis fatuus of a popular show that was also capable of seriousness, embarking yet one more time on the difficult project of integrating the diverse and seemingly contradictory aspects of his nature.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Unrehearsed Realities

  WHEN HE STARTED work on his new programme, Welles had barely recovered from a sharp bout of hepatitis, which had in turn provoked his chronic back problems, forcing him to resort to the somewhat medieval corrective device that had been so commented on at the time of his recent army medical. As may be readily imagined, Welles was not a placid invalid, modelling himself instead on Sheridan Whiteside in Kaufman and Hart’s play The Man Who Came to Dinner (a part Welles always claimed had been written for him, and in which he did eventually appear on television in the mid-sixties): demanding, cantankerous, domineering. He and Rita Hayworth spent Christmas of 1943 at the Straights’ family home in Old Westbury in Long Island, with Beatrice Straight and her husband Louis Dolivet. Beatrice’s young half-brother and sister William and Ruth Elmhirst were deeply impressed that Welles, alone of all the guests, was fed a diet of steaks, a luxury known to few at the height of wartime rationing. Dadda Bernstein had sent a note insisting that Welles must have large quantities of meat, which he was prepared to back up with an order form to the Food Rationing Board. It proved unnecessary at that time, but he had occasion to issue the order more than once during the remaining two years of the war. The Welleses moved on to Miami for New Year, but soon went back to Los Angeles to be nearer Dadda and medical care; they stayed in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Welles’s dependence on Dadda is very striking; at times of physical stress he became a big, needy baby.

  He had sufficiently recovered by early January 1944 to apply himself to his new radio programme, The Orson Welles Almanac. There was a new sponsor – the Socony-Vacuum Company – and he was dealing with a new agency, Compton’s. The form of the programme was original, loosely based on the magazine format that Welles had striven for in It’s All True, with a nod towards annual predictive publications, like Old Moore’s Almanac. It threw together cod astrology, knockabout comedy with guest stars, a ‘No, but seriously, folks’ spot with great poetry or prose or a scene from a play, plus topical comment. Welles was not the same person he had been in 1941 when he had produced his last series, The Lady Esther Show. In particular, he was much more politically aware. Almost immediately he ran into trouble with his spon
sors, who attempted to censor a satirical item about Generalissimo Franco. The intervention made Welles anxiously question his future relationship with them. In fact, he was hoping surreptitiously to increase the political content of the show, while at the same time seeking to establish himself as a mainstream comedian. These are not irreconcilable ambitions, though radical political comedy, of a sort practised in the second half of the twentieth century by the great Italian clown Dario Fo, or in the first half by the German political cabaret artist Karl Valentin, for example, has never been part of the central English-speaking tradition; and indeed, Welles made no attempt to integrate his comedy and his politics: they were to coexist side-by-side.

  The history of the Almanac was the history of his attempts to pursue these two separate strands, the comic and the political, in the face of resistance on both counts. With the serious stuff – the extracts from great plays and the poetry readings – there was no quarrel. Welles had no desire to experiment with form, pushing the radiophonic boundaries as he had in the thirties; his aim with the Almanac was to create a free-wheeling half hour of fun and stimulation imbued with Popular Front sentiments. He was as inventive and exuberant as ever, but only in point of content, not form. ‘February 2nd is Ground Hog day,’ he wrote to the writers of the show, ‘so please give me some jokes on the ground hog.1 I have an idea for this and if you gentlemen say you don’t “feel it” I’ll stuff you with red rocks, sew up your lips and throw you in the Amazon. Here’s the idea – an interview with a ground hog himself.’ He also hoped to introduce (‘sneak’, as he put it) some real jazz into the programme, convinced as he was that jazz, being both popular and radical, had been deliberately sidelined into becoming an esoteric delight for buffs. He was, in fact, quite a buff himself, and had the researchers seek out the veteran clarinet player Jimmie Noone, ‘who, I believe, is still playing at the “Streets of Paris’”. This element, too, was an immediate success.

  It was the comedy that proved difficult. Welles found himself under attack in an area where it is painful to have to defend oneself. The network tried to push him towards broader humour. ‘You say that people are slow to accept me as a comedian,’2 he wrote awkwardly to Bob Presnell of CBS shortly after the programme had begun transmission, to poor responses, ‘but I think we are breaking down their resistance pretty quickly.’ Propounding his theory of comedy, Welles cites Jack Benny and Fred Allen, the leading radio comedians of the day: ‘the one is comic in himself, the other isn’t. Benny is a butt, Allen a butt-er’. He (Welles) he says, must be the latter, a butt-er, because he is the producer of the show, and identified as such. He must be in control, in charge. ‘I don’t intend you to think that I imagine myself to be another Fred Allen – but I do think of myself as Orson Welles and I do believe that my personality is sufficient to carry a half hour of fun and jokes without the imposition of such farce devices as your letter proposes.’ It would spoil the ‘serious spot’ at the end, making it a dramatic situation – that is, not real. ‘What I am trying to say is that unless I am clearly the master of the show I am presenting, everything that transpires on it may partake of a sort of spurious suspense – Maybe I don’t make myself clear. The hell with you! – Fond regards.’

  He may have made himself all too clear: mastery was a very big issue with Welles; it was impossible for him to be subordinate. His entire personality was constructed on being masterful, and to acknowledge that he might be genuinely vulnerable – that he might be wrong-footed, thrown off course, not know what to do at any moment – was something he could not contemplate. Alas for his future as a comedian, this is the essential predicate of comedy. Even the blustering Fred Allen is taken aback; things don’t turn out the way he expects them to. Welles’s contrast of Benny and Allen echoes Georges Feydeau’s famous analysis (of farce, as it happens, but it applies equally well to all comedy): in comedy there is one who is kicked, and one who does the kicking. But the kicker is only funny when his kick misfires, or when he falls down afterwards. Welles thought that to offer himself up for mockery was a guarantee of mirth; it wasn’t, unless somewhere behind it was an admission of genuine vulnerability. Behind Benny’s vanity is real aspiration; behind Allen’s ferocity is dim-wittedness. There is thus tension, and the possibility of surprise. Welles as a comedian is monolithic and one-dimensional, because he himself is trapped in the very thing he seeks to use as his comic persona. He cannot, dare not, let us see anything behind it.

  Shortly afterwards, John McMillan from Compton’s Agency sent a telegram to Presnell gently criticising the show’s repetitiveness, adding: YOU ALSO HAVE TENDENCY TOWARDS UNPLEASANT ANATOMICAL HUMOUR.3 He urged them to improve on the Serious Spot. LAST WEEK’S SHOW … SEEMED CONFUSED AND PREACHY. It appeared, he said, TO BE GILDING THE LILY OF DEMOCRACY. He apologised for his toughness, was with them 100 per cent, AND APPRECIATE YOURS AND ORSON’S PROBLEMS. In fact, Presnell never got this wire; Welles intercepted it, ‘rashly put into my hands by CBS who said they thought I might be interested in it.4 How right they were. It held my attention from beginning to end. I think it would be a good policy if you would wire your thoughts about the show directly to me from now on instead of forcing me to steam open Presnell’s correspondence …’ He responds ferociously to the criticism it contains: ‘it would be helpful if you would specify exactly what is meant by quote unpleasant unquote quote anatomical unquote and I am tempted to say quote humour unquote’. An attempt at irony tumbles over into sarcasm of the heaviest kind: ‘Your closing expressions of sympathy are what caused me the most serious concern. You say quote appreciate yours and Orson’s problems unquote. I didn’t have any problems until I read your wire and Presnell hasn’t any problems until you read this wire. In closing may I warn you against using invisible ink in your interoffice memos and besides I think you ought to know that our counterespionage experts can break down any code in twenty four hours.’ He was deeply hurt, feeling himself under attack from all sides. He wrote to his old supporter Leonard Lyons of the New York Post to apologise for having sent a grumpy wire about Lyons’s quotation of a rather inspired Noël Coward witticism about Welles’s jaundice (‘When Orson gets sick it would be in Technicolor’): ‘the main intention was comic and as a rueful acknowledgement of the bad press I have been getting everywhere in the last few weeks’.5 At moments like these, Welles’s genuine hurt can be glimpsed. ‘I very much want you to know,’ he told the columnist, ‘that you can publish anything you want about me any time. And that even if, god forbid, you never mention me again, I love you … now please write to me again.’ The storm passed, though the sun never really came out for the Almanac.

  A show in early March with Lucille Ball is characteristic: it opens with a sketch concerning the Orson Welles Fan Club; cue for much squealing from the audience. Most of the jokes are about his girth (then of course a fraction of what it was to become): Welles attempts to dictate letters to his secretary Miss Grimace, who tells him, ‘That’ll be all.’6 ‘That’ll be all who? he demands, testily. ‘That’ll be all, Fatso.’ The horoscope gags at the beginning are dismally poor: ‘The Moon is in Sagittarius, which rules the thighs and hips, so it should be a great night at the Palladium.’ There is a lot of breaking up by the actors, some of it real, some faked; Welles himself stumbles over the script beyond the acceptable point of charming human error. Regular characters – Dr Snakeoil and Prudence Pratt – make dutiful appearances, and the audience laughs at the standard wartime jokes in Pavlovian fashion. An air of frankly amateurish chaos prevails until a sudden gear-change for the Serious Spot, which this week illustrates what Welles calls ‘the immense proposition that every man belongs to all men’: he intones Donne’s mighty sermon on that theme – ‘never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee’ – sonorously enough but without making it fresh.

  The following week Charles Laughton is the guest star, which naturally provokes a further orgy of fat jokes, plus some about how ugly they both are. There is a passably funny scene with the man
from the Reducing Studio, then a sequence – richly appreciated by the audience – about filling in government forms, amortisation, et cetera. He and Laughton perform the tent scene from Julius Caesar, with Welles as Brutus very close to the microphone, emoting nobly as in his earlier radio version. By no means typecasting for ‘lean and hungry Cassius’ – but it is radio, after all – Laughton, with his much wider range, is very arresting. The applause is polite. Then Welles suddenly comes alive in a verbal rhapsody about jazz: ‘many of you listening have never heard it before.7 What you’ve heard are jazz ideas slicked up by commercial musicians.’ There always has to be a villain with Welles, but in this case it adds real punch to what he says. ‘The whole thing started in the wide-open good time carnival city that was New Orleans before the last war. From that it spread to Chicago and all over the world and influenced all popular music. This is Art for Art’s sake if anything ever was – music musicians play for themselves for their own satisfaction, just because they like it.’ He introduces what he calls ‘the only existing jazz band’ made up of Mutt Carey, Kid Ory, Jimmie Noone, Buster Wilson, Ed Scott, Zutty Singleton – called The All Star New Orleans Band, but renamed for the occasion the Mercury All Stars. The trombonist Ory holds himself somewhat aloof from Welles; when introduced he says, ‘What’s that name again?’ Welles, unfazed, embraces him, rattling off the names of all his albums. It is infectious and genuine and full of love, alive with his electric powers of communication, and it feels as if Welles is relieved to be able to throw off the burden of comedy.