by Simon Callow
The rhetoric betrays the influence of his mentor Dolivet, whose idiom it closely resembles. Welles’s general enthusiasm for the election result was enhanced by the receipt of a drolly phrased letter from Roosevelt himself (which appears to have been the standard letter of thanks to his supporters in the entertainment world, but which Welles took very personally): ‘Dear Mr Welles, I may be a prejudiced spectator who had a special interest in the action but I want to thank you for the splendid role you played in the recent campaign.38 I cannot recall any campaign in which actors and artists were so effective in the unrehearsed realities of the drama of the American future. It was a great show in which you played a great part. Very sincerely yours Franklin D. Roosevelt.’ ‘Dear Mr President,’ replied Welles, ‘You cannot know how your marvellously thoughtful and very kind letter was appreciated.39 I count my small part in this last campaign as the highest privilege of my life, and our visit on the train as the richest experience. Rita joins me in wishing you the compliments of the season.’ He signs himself with a rather striking adverb: ‘Yours truthfully, Orson Welles.’
Altogether, 1944 ended on a cheerful note for him. He had been engaged on extremely favourable terms by the New York Post as a syndicated daily columnist, and on 17 December, Rita Hayworth had given birth to a daughter whom they named Rebecca (not after the Daphne du Maurier book that Welles had twice performed on radio, but after the Jewish heroine of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, which Hayworth – always desperate to catch up on her husband’s omnivorous reading habits – had rather impressively just finished). Welles drew a sketch with stars to celebrate the baby’s arrival and put it on that year’s Christmas card. It was the most personal endorsement Rebecca Welles would ever receive from her father, although the event elicited telegrams of congratulation from Mrs Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, which most certainly endorsed him; not many actor-directors might have expected their baby’s birth to be welcomed by both the President’s wife and the Vice-President. In his message, Truman said, ‘I know she can’t help having a grand career with the support she will have from her parents’ – a prediction that proved sadly untrue at any level.40
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Actor Turns Columnist
WELLES SHOWED AS little interest in the birth of his new baby as he had in the birth of Christopher Welles six years earlier. In fact, Christopher’s principal significance in his life was as an occasion for acrimonious disputes over alimony, which finally ended up in court; his pleas of poverty got him off the hook. (In a piquant turn of events, Virginia Welles’s new husband was the screenwriter Charles Lederer, who happened to be the nephew of Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst’s mistress; Christopher accordingly spent occasional weekends in San Simeon under the roof of the man who had done everything in his power to destroy her father and his precocious masterpiece.)
Meanwhile Welles’s relationship with Rita Hayworth had reached a watershed of sorts. They had been together for nearly eighteen months, during which time the exhilaration of Welles’s initial triumphant conquest of one of the supreme sexual icons of the day – one who proved, if anything, more passionate in the bedroom than his fantasies had imagined – had inevitably been tempered by day-to-day reality. He discovered that the sultry goddess of the screen was in person sweet-natured and homely, which was delightful and touching, but that she was also immensely needy, which was less so. It was something of a novelty in a relationship for Welles, who had hitherto been the one requiring attention, consideration and support – all of which Dolores del Rio had provided in abundance. Not that Hayworth was ungiving emotionally: on the contrary, she idolised Welles, which was by no means the thing he most wanted; indeed, it was perhaps the thing he least wanted. The feeling of being looked to for everything, of being looked at to the exclusion of all else – in extreme close-up, so to speak – was displeasing to Welles. The inherent feeling of responsibility oppressed him and made him feel exposed; his shiftiness under that all-loving, all-needing gaze was immense. Educating Rita soon lost its charm for him; she was not an apt pupil, and he longed for the conversation of his intellectual equals.
It soon dawned on Welles that there was something beyond mere common insecurity in his wife’s incessant demands for attention; he swiftly apprehended the degree to which she had been damaged by the two successive evil geniuses in her life, her sexually abusing father and her pimping first husband, to whom might be added, on a non-sexual level, the obsessive control exercised over her by Harry Cohn, who was still her unrelenting employer. She wanted above all to find a man whom she could trust; the one she chose was as far from the ideal in that regard as could be imagined. From the very beginning of their time together, her jealous suspiciousness of Welles was overwhelming, which inevitably impelled him to justify her suspicions; before long – particularly after she had become pregnant – he was vigorously playing the field, leaving her alone with the baby he thought would satisfy both her domestic and her loving impulses. In fact, Hayworth had two rivals for his attention: other women (sometimes lovers, like Judy Garland, but most often prostitutes); and his work, which now comprised writing a daily newspaper column, starting two new radio series in quick succession, pursuing a political career as a prominent supporter of the newly re-elected Roosevelt, editing Free World magazine, working under Dolivet for the organisation, planning theatre productions and, finally, acting in the one film a year he was prepared to make to earn some serious money.
In fact, Rita Hayworth was the principal bread-winner in the family, and had, early in their relationship, lent Welles some $30,000 to stabilise his finances. His sense of humiliation in having a wife who was not only immensely more famous than he was, but also richer, is not to be underestimated in explaining his compulsive absenteeism from her side. Interestingly, she shared his political views, broadly speaking, and was indeed a considerable asset to him in his capacity as Free World activist. When he organised a conference in early 1945, shortly after the birth of Rebecca, she was the guest of honour; there was great anxiety when she feared that she might not be able to attend, and it was clear that in that context, of the two of them, Welles was the more dispensable. But when they went to stay (as they frequently did) with the Dolivets at the Whitney mansion in upstate New York, she was expected to be quiet while the two men discussed the higher questions of strategy and philosophy; Hayworth and Dolivet’s wife, the brilliant actress – and no mean intellect – Beatrice Straight, were encouraged to repair to the verandah and take afternoon tea together, which they did, uncomfortably. It was understood that Welles was being groomed for political office: Dolivet had plans for him as a possible secretary-general of the soon-to-be constituted United Nations Organisation, while Roosevelt – in whose court he had become, he said to Kathleen Tynan, ‘a kind of licensed jester’ – encouraged him to think that he might one day be President.1
In so far as this meant that he would be leaving Hollywood (and taking her with him), Rita Hayworth was all for it; her loathing of the studios and everything that they represented was even greater than Welles’s, and perhaps with better reason. Somewhat to her surprise and entirely to her displeasure, at the beginning of 1945 he decided to act opposite Claudette Colbert in the film Tomorrow Is Forever. It was a second stab, after Jane Eyre, at conventional Hollywood stardom. The film’s producer, Bill Goetz (who had produced Jane Eyre) announced that casting Welles in it was one of the most important casting assignments in the history of his company, which may have been so, but his excitement was not widely duplicated beyond the company. It is one of many wartime films that deals with the loss of loved ones: the somewhat strained plot here has Welles being disfigured in action, having reconstructive surgery and returning to his wife under a pseudonym and with a foreign accent some twenty years later. It is a performance like none other in Welles’s career as an actor, interestingly pitched (once the somehow awkward opening sequence with him as the young American is over): very softly, very quietly, the impeccable German accent used to s
triking effect, and with an undertow of real feeling, as if Welles was moved by what was happening inside him. The make-up (by Maurice Seidermann, whom Welles had discovered sweeping up the floor at RKO and had promoted to chief make-up artist on Citizen Kane) is curious: it is quite obviously artificial, as so often with Welles, although for once he uses his own nose, which sits a little strangely with the bearded face, creating an uncommon feeling of vulnerability.
The performance itself – as distinct from the make-up – is as close to a full transformation as Welles ever comes on film, restrained and sensitive. It is his misfortune that his co-star gives one of her very finest performances, living wholly in the minute, going with pinpoint precision from emotion to emotion, from the early dreaminess of her anticipation of her young husband’s return from war, through numb grief, to growing happiness in her new family, anxiety about her son’s desire to enlist and intuitive disturbance at the bearded stranger’s arrival. By comparison, Welles is somehow static – nothing moves within his conception of the character; statement of character follows statement of character: intelligent, varied, feeling, sensitive, but without any of the involuntary surges of impulse to which the camera so eagerly responds. Welles is always doing the performance; it’s never simply happening, never out of his control, and his great climactic emotional moment, when he is called upon to speak the title line, is simply stagy. It is a very different kind of theatrical performance, to be sure, from those he gives in Kane, Jane Eyre and Journey into Fear, but it remains essentially projected: the camera (and hence the audience) is never allowed to be make its own discoveries; it is always told what to feel, what to think. After Tomorrow Is Forever, Welles’s status as a film actor remained what it was before: he was thought of as a formidable presence who always seemed somehow too big for whatever film he chose to appear in.
For Rita Hayworth, the period of shooting was a sort of nightmare. Convinced (quite rightly) that Welles was seizing the opportunity when he wasn’t actually on the set to have assignations with young women, she would appear at the studio in a frenzy of jealous rage; but he was well protected by his colleagues, and she would disappear again in an anguish of frustration and humiliation. Meanwhile, and throughout the period of filming, Welles was writing his column for Ted Thackrey’s New York Post. It was Thackrey’s idea: he told Welles’s manager Jackson Leighter that they were ‘as excited as hell’ about it, and were looking forward eagerly to the first of them.2 Tempting fate, Welles called the column ‘The Orson Welles Almanac’, preserving the pot-pourri character of the failed radio show as well as its strained conceit of guyed fortune-telling in the manner of Old Moore’s Almanac or the Farmers Almanac. He was desperate to succeed in this latest incarnation, not only from financial motives – and if the column was successfully syndicated, he stood to make a very great deal of money – or even because he saw it as another platform for his political causes, but because he genuinely wanted to do it well. He was as touchingly eager to make a go of it as he had been to be a radio comedian. In a sort of trailer for the column, he had filled in again for his old chum Leonard Lyons, the Post’s much-loved regular showbiz columnist. ‘What is it that makes a man want to write for the newspapers?’3 he asks, confessing to his early pulp writing again, name-dropping furiously – Thornton Wilder and Alexander Woollcott (he calls him Alec) begged him to stop, he says. He repeats the tale of his ‘Inklings’ column in Highland Park News and his Dublin escapades. ‘All too often my public appearances have had more to thank presumption than equipment, so don’t ask me why I think I can write a column.’ In fact, his public appearances had more to do with equipment than with preparation. ‘Compare me, if you will,’ he ended, with one of those after-dinner-speech flourishes to which he sometimes succumbed, ‘to my foolish and finny cousin the salmon, who toils and labours upstream against the most fearful odds, only to lay his little eggs.’
He started jauntily and with great industriousness, which is just as well: six columns a week is a very serious undertaking. Declaring himself as nervous as a kitten, Welles promised Thackrey two solid weeks of columns in advance, asking for twenty-four more hours ‘to fuss’.4 Thackrey was delighted with what he read: ALMANAC VERY LUSTY FROM BIRTH, he cabled.5 SURE TO HAVE LONG USEFUL HAPPY EXISTENCE WITH NO ARTIFICIAL RESPIRATION NECESSARY. Financial indicators from the syndicate were encouraging, promising a return of at least $15,000–20,000 a year, though Thackrey believed that the minimum would be $40,000 ‘up to eighty’ – a huge sum for 1945. Welles retained his researcher Geneva Cranston from the radio Almanac; working from Washington, she supplied him with regular analytical reports and insider gossip – ‘It looks as if the administration is going to have another hot potato on its hands very shortly, possibly within the next few days.6 I refer to the proposed senate investigation into violations of the mails by the Office of Censorship’ – which would form the substance of the political element of the columns, in which anniversaries, astrology, hard-hitting political analysis and Little Known Facts (‘The onion and the asparagus are members of the lily family’) jostled for the reader’s attention.
The very first column, at the end of January, was particularly well stuffed. It started: ‘Our Astrology department says that this is a good day for all born under all signs, and for planting all things that grow above the ground’; then Welles told his readers that Byron was born on this day, as was D. W. Griffith.7 He furnishes a quote from Woodrow Wilson about the purpose of war; then he launches into the main matter, an account of Roosevelt’s fourth inauguration. ‘The whole affair was as simple as anybody can remember. If you’ve been married more than twice, you like your wedding to be small and quiet. I think that’s how the President felt about this inauguration. He played his part in the ritual like a veteran bridegroom. I was there and I got the impression that this fourth term was his favourite wife. The inauguration of a President really is a kind of a betrothal – with promises to love, honour and obey. I always feel like crying at a wedding, and that’s how I felt Saturday.’ Quoting Roosevelt’s famous rallying cry, ‘we have nothing to fear but fear itself, he ends: ‘I think the man who said that is man enough for America’s biggest job, which is the biggest job in history.’ The tone is overtly political and treats his readers as if they are grown-ups with political opinions of their own. The big success of the column, of course, is his eye-witness account of the inauguration, which he wrote, as it happens, three days before the event.
In fact, this column is unlike almost all its successors, which suggests that Welles may have decided at the last moment to scrap what he had written and go for a big story. This is a little dangerous, since it is crucial in a column to establish a voice and a format that becomes habit-forming for the reader. The second column (‘the Feast of St Ildephonsus and a good day for fishing’) is indeed much more heterogeneous, though not lacking in political content, including a rather dry account of world reaction to the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, another news item about France’s frustration with Big Three diplomacy, a scoop about the Teheran Conference and a report, under the heading JAPANESE INVENTIONS DEPARTMENT, that they have invented a chemical antidote to B-29S. Welles signs off: ‘The sting of a bee does not make a muskmelon sweet.’8 It is an awkward mixture of elements; the tone seems misjudged.
Before he really had time to get into his stride as a commentator, the rest of the press was already providing its own commentary on him. No matter how brilliant the column might have been, he was not going to be allowed to get away with it: journalists are understandably unenthusiastic about amateurs muscling in on their patch. Under the heading ACTOR TURNS COLUMNIST, Time magazine reported that ‘Orson Welles, 29, precocious Master of a number of trades – and jack of several more – apprenticed himself to a new one: newspaper columning.’9 Readers, the piece amiably continues, got: ‘1) excerpts from Welles’s favourite reading, the Farmers Almanac; 2) handy hints about cooking; 3) cocksure remarks about foreign affairs; 4) personal chitchat’. Then the writer swiftl
y and proficiently goes for the jugular, casually revealing that Welles’s account of Roosevelt’s inauguration had been pure invention. Poor Welles, always being caught out! The Time writer expresses further scepticism about Welles’s ‘cocksure remarks about foreign affairs’, specifically his pretence of insider knowledge of events at Teheran. However, Welles was not to be daunted. In the same article, he is quoted as dismissing such quibbles, staunchly informing the Time reporter that ‘right now I’m much more interested in politics and foreign affairs than I am in the theatre. I have set up my life in such a way that I can spend more than occasional time on these interests.’ Statements of that sort always enrage journalists.
He offered an even greater hostage to fortune to the New Yorker. ‘The column is so important,’ he said, ‘that I plan to devote all my time to it as soon as I can.10 I’ve given up all my Hollywood work except to act in one picture each year.’ He had already vexed the journalistic community with his anti-fascist lecture tour, which started in New York. ‘Until the other day,’ the magazine reported under the headline DEDICATED WUNDERKIND, ‘we regarded Orson Welles as simply an actor, producer, writer, costumer, magician, Shakespearean editor, and leading prodigy of our generation, and then out of our mail fluttered an announcement that he was … delivering an oration called The Nature of the Enemy at the City Centre.’ The writer quoted the publicity leaflet verbatim and without comment: ‘Mr Welles’s understanding of international happenings,’ the leaflet stated, ‘has been widely acknowledged. Not only has he the ability of analysis, but of prophecy, and he also has the master’s art of making his statements felt by everybody.’ His gift for prophecy had obviously been invaluable in his account of the presidential inauguration. The anonymous New Yorker journalist cornered Welles during a publicity-shot session to promote his lecture tour, and found him looking ‘the same as the last time we saw him – moon-faced, girthy, bland and authoritative’, noting ‘a considerable resemblance to the Boy Orator of the Platte’. Welles was still on the defensive. ‘Naturally,’ he says, ‘a lot of people are going to ask, “What’s a ham actor think he’s doing as an expert on international affairs?”’ His participation in public affairs, he argues, will prove that ‘international matters are not as mysterious as Rosicrucianism or something. We’ve got to outgrow our Toy Tinker stage of anti-fascism and use a sophisticated approach.’ Welles is so intense about fighting fascism, the New Yorker snidely continues, ‘that he’s not only going to orate against it but also will give it hell in the newspaper column he’s launching this week in the Post.’ Welles is swift with his riposte: ‘The editor of this Almanac has been concerning himself with matters of state and the hope of a permanent peace for just about as long as the editors of the New Yorker.11 Indeed, he already has a big scrapbook full of indignant newsprint demanding his immediate return to the seclusion of the playhouse.’ He claims misreporting. ‘By inventing a queer string of surrealist sentences and attributing them to him, this current issue manages to imply that his hatred of fascism is nothing but a rather silly fad. The New Yorker ought to be ashamed of itself. It knows as well as you do that anti-fascism is never silly, even when a movie director or a comic newspaper work in its behalf.’ A very understandable reaction, but his reply was not, perhaps, the best move; inevitably he ended up sounding pompous.