Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  In his columns Welles was absolutely consistent in his themes as he strove to find the column’s voice, hitting on a curious persona, a blend of sophisticated insider and People’s Tribune: the Shadow on a Popular Front ticket. Urging faith in the forthcoming Big Three meeting at Yalta, he writes, ‘I visited our State Department the other day – that former citadel of cynicism – and they told me that hopes were high’;12 he finds the same, he says, in his visits to the British and Soviet embassies, implying casual familiarity. He confirms his allegiance to Henry Wallace, now, of course, out of government; Welles was unmistakably flagging him up as a possible successor to Roosevelt, when the time should come. He appeals to Wallace’s constituency, imagining it to be identical with the readership of the paper. ‘In the Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue you’ll hear the people’s voice speaking out from frayed scraps of paper, from simple neat sheets of stationery, from penny post cards. The little grocery man, the fellow who runs the hardware store, the farmer who’s getting ready to start ploughing – he has no time to call Washington, he can’t afford a telegram, but he’s for Henry Wallace.’ Welles cannot write exclusively for the customers of the Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue for long. He is too restless. He cannot be confined. The key to a successful column is the reader’s identification of the columnist: he or she comes to recognise the writer, to know his views, his style, the area of life about which he writes. They do not need to agree with his opinions, simply to know what they are. But who is Orson Welles the columnist? For whom is he writing? He seems to be everywhere, and to know everyone: one day he reports from a conference in Mexico, which he is attending on behalf of Free World. He finds Henry Wallace, his temporarily eclipsed hero, there: ‘This war is not all destruction, it is also hope – faith in the destiny of the common man.13 Henry Wallace’s political body lies mouldering for the moment in the grave, but his statesmanship goes marching on.’ Welles’s passion for pan-Americanism naturally finds rich matter in the activities of the conference, which brings out his hemispheric omniscience. He appears to have first-hand information about everyone present, and even some who are absent. Writing of the overthrow of Colonel Jorge Ubico, the Guatemalan dictator, he says, ‘we still make jokes about those revolutions down in Central America. We used to be right because they used to be funny, or at least, futile. What happened down in Guatemala wasn’t a bit funny. Almost nobody except the Reader’s Digest ever had a good word for Ubico, who was one of the worst despots of our time. What’s worse, he was clever. It wasn’t easy to get rid of him.’ He seems to have everyone’s ear: ‘one of the most exuberant of Guatemala’s young officials – speaking in a tone of the most genial sincerity – said this to me: “The Leader of our government is a fine man. We love him but we keep a gun at his head. If he betrays our revolution we will shoot him.”’

  This is good, vivid foreign-correspondent writing of a school that even in Welles’s day was vanishing, and might have come out of a novel by Ambler or Greene; it seems not quite to belong in a column like the ‘Almanac’. In the same vein, writing of the death of the Mexican General Maximo Avila Camacho, Welles says:

  The general was the finest example of his kind I’ve known.14 Wonderfully generous to his friends I know he was, and I’ve heard wonderfully dangerous to beautiful ladies and to his enemies. He had authentic glamour, and he muted the gaudiness of his position with a certain sleek elegance. The fans adored him. It’s too bad he had to die, said my fellow turista, and just then a turista came up to read the news board. The general is dead, I said to him. Gracias a dios, said the Mexican. I climbed in a cab to go back to the hotel. The driver was weeping.

  This is quintessential Welles, and could have gone straight into a narration from one of his own films – one in which he would, of course, have played the general himself. Welles’s love of the colourful detail, of the panache of bravura personality, sits interestingly with his espousal of homespun American values. Reporting on Ezequiel Padilla’s speech at the conference, he says, star-struck, ‘Mexico’s Foreign Minister fought in the revolution. He rode beside Pancho Villa wearing a natty black suit. And a stiff white collar.’ But he constantly and diligently reverts to the issues. Regardless of prejudice or personalities, Welles says, this conference is getting down to brass tacks. He solemnly reads his notes on Padilla’s speech to a fellow-conference member who missed it. ‘This war is above all a social revolution, the greatest in history.’ It is an extraordinary and improbable vision: Welles sitting at his desk, notepad in hand, like a good student in class. It is yet another Welles, an entirely authentic one: a natural radical, but drawn to power like a moth to the flame, and willing to earn his place in its orbit.

  This must have been heady stuff for the readers of the New York Post, drawn to the column, perhaps, by having heard Welles on the Jack Benny Show, or having seen him in Jane Eyre. To find him hobnobbing with the revolutionary cadres of Latin America must have been quite a surprise. Just when they were getting used to that Welles, readers were introduced to another – Welles the would-be revolutionary artist. In the column he writes passionately but precisely about the Mexican painters David Siqueiros, Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, drawings by the last-named having just been seized and destroyed by US Customs. He laments the descent into banality of Rivera and Orozco, coming out in favour of Siqueiros as a true artist of the revolution. ‘Bursting up out of the bloody crust of the earth complete with ball and chain,’ he says of the mural entitled Democracy, ‘even the torch of liberty and the clenched fist of Communism salute.15 Its lack of sophistication would have been vulgar and even silly if it were not great painting. And it is.’ He compares this piece by the committed communist with the trivialisations of his politically neutral fellow-artists: ‘It would be easy to denounce Siqueiros as the blind servant of the party line, but he is doing the most adventurous and independent work in the world of art. As for his unshackled comrades, Rivera is decorating night clubs, and Orozco is depicting democracy as a rattled and bedizened whore.’ Everywhere in this piece is Welles’s longing for real revolutionary art, art that matters, that expresses something more important than mere personal relations, mere personality: the sort of work he had touched on so briefly and so frustratingly in the jangadeiros section of It’s All True. There is too the sense that this antinomian, this born foe of authority, longs to have some parameters, to be contained, especially by strongly held convictions.

  The political arena is clearly the one that he wants to inhabit in the column, but from time to time he comments on the world of theatre and film, name-dropping genially. John Barrymore is a frequent guest star, so to speak, a sort of recurring character: ‘we loved the man this side idolatry … we knew Jack since we were five.16 He was our foster uncle and our foster brother and our foster child.’ The great actor, it appears, had the curious and rather suggestive notion that if Hamlet had stayed in England (‘and avoided ghosts and graveyards’) he would have lived to be old and fat and become Falstaff. ‘The good life is about to be the death of him. He’s ruined himself, and it’s been fun. Hamlet or Mad Jack – Falstaff or Barrymore (call him what you will) only regretted his sins because there weren’t more of them … Barrymore, who was the last Hamlet of our theatre, lived to be a lean lascivious Falstaff.’ A few days later, he describes how Barrymore hit true genius at the dress rehearsal of his first Hamlet, but this particular column seems to tell us more about Welles than about its ostensible subject:

  the rest of his life was anti-climax.17 There wasn’t anything left to do except go on imitating, as accurately as possible, that one great evening … the truth is that after that dress rehearsal, Jack began to fear that he couldn’t do anything else as good again. I think he was afraid to find out for certain, so he set about destroying himself, as publicly and as entertainingly as possible … he used to tell me that he hated theatre. But he couldn’t kid either one of us. We spent hundreds of hours together, planning the production of a dozen plays. And I began to gu
ess that what he hated was the responsibility of his own genius. Jack wanted to keep it a secret from both of us.

  (Barrymore held a kind of emblematic significance for Welles, as a sort of alter ego, a spiritual Doppelgänger, and he always writes very touchingly about him. It has soberly to be noted, however, that there is no evidence whatsoever for the level of intimacy that Welles suggests existed between them; no biography of Barrymore – and there have been many – even mentions Welles.)

  In another column, Welles casually observes: ‘Chaliapin used to hold me on his knee when I was very little.’18 In Kenosha, Wisconsin? ‘He made such an impression that I finally confused him with God and directed all my prayers at him …’ (From time to time in later life, Welles would claim that Chaliapin was his real father. Or it might be Edward VII.) Then there is more general comment on the entertainment business. One striking column is devoted to an attack on the monopolising tendencies of the studios as they move in on the nascent medium of television: ‘The me-only boys are trying to sew up television and they will, too, unless we stop them.19 Receiving sets in New York are so adjusted that you can only get ten television broadcasting studios …’ Television, he says, has long been considered potential competition to the movies. The big studios are now applying for licences; Warner Bros have bought a site for a television studio. Welles brings the subject a little closer to home. The studios had been prohibited by law from owning movie theatres. ‘[Jack Warner] says he can’t see why his company shouldn’t be allowed to own the theatres that play his pictures. I say that sort of ownership is what makes independent productions so perilously close to the impossible.’ Welles clearly now sees himself as separate from the studios. ‘Jack claims that one of his theatres will play one of my pictures as quickly and cheerfully as it will give the time to one of his. I say that’s spinach and I say the hell with it.’ This six-foot-three David simply can’t help aiming his pebbles at Goliath. And of course he was right; the studios were so constituted that there was never a chance for him to work the only way he knew how on film or in television. His confidence in the power of free speech is touching, though he undoubtedly knew that his crusade was doomed.

  Nor was his combativeness confined to potential employers. On another occasion, he breaks a taboo on attacking the work of a colleague; the general view is that artists get enough distress from critics without adding to it themselves. Welles lines his sights up against the Shakespeare productions of Margaret Webster, the English-born doyenne of classical directors in America, particularly noted for her work with Welles’s arch-enemy, Maurice Evans: ‘Every season for quite some time now Margaret Webster has presented our theatre with at least one Shakespeare revival.20 None of these productions has been very original or remarkable in any way, but all of them have met with unqualified success. Indeed, I think Miss Webster has avoided bad notices too long for her own good. She’s a director and so am I, so maybe I’m not the one to break her luck. I’m going to anyway. She’s a lady but I’m no gentleman.’ He describes her as a skilled and careful craftsman who has never presented anything to the public that is perfectly terrible. ‘As a producer who has offered something perfectly terrible to the public even more frequently than he’s been panned by the press, I regard that infallibility with envy.’ He quietly savages her pleasant and widely acclaimed production of The Tempest (‘intensely theatrical’, according to the critic of the paper in which Welles was writing), offering instead his own view that the play ‘should be something between a magic show and a ballet’. This again is a curious use of the column: the attack on Webster seems mean-spirited, as it always does when anyone attacks their own kind. (It is to be regretted en passant that Welles never directed or acted in The Tempest, which would have suited his gifts perfectly, with Shakespeare’s great magician bang at the centre of the action.) Similarly, in praising William Castle’s B-movie When Strangers Marry, he says, ‘It isn’t as slick as Double Indemnity or as glossy as Laura, but it’s better acted and better directed … than either.’21 This was presumably Welles’s attempt to be more showbizzy, but it was dangerous stuff, and likely to do him no good – not that that was ever a great concern of his.

  Perhaps he had been told to stir things up. Looking round for targets, he next attacks a fellow-columnist, Westbrook Pegler, whom Frank Sinatra, having allegedly come from a meeting with union organisers, had punched on the nose. ‘If it was his plan to celebrate the Roosevelt victory by punching Pegler, Frank did not confide it to us, although that notion is one that might have occurred to any one of 25 million people … I can’t speak for his intentions regarding the man who has repeatedly defended lynching as an American institution, but I’m very sure that if Sinatra ever felt like hitting him, it wasn’t merely because Mrs Roosevelt’s husband was re-elected.’22 his interesting glimpse of Popular Front solidarity – at this early stage of his life Sinatra was very publicly associated with left-wing politics – also contains a note of violence that appears from time to time in Welles’s public statements, an ugly tone that carries intimations of personal menace. Denouncing the painter Orozco’s latest work, for instance, he says: ‘The villainous customs official who destroyed the one of José Clemente’s best years, might redeem himself now by smuggling an axe and a blow-torch into Mexico’s Mecca for the international white trash.23 A few minutes of honest vandalism could undo a great wrong.’

  Welles was absolutely fearless in taking the opposing view to that of the majority of his readers. Noting the anniversary of Emmeline Pankhurst’s imprisonment, he even dares to suggest that being a law-abiding citizen might be a relative concept: ‘Mrs Pankhurst and her lady friends broke the law as well as the windows, but the millions of women who now enjoy the vote are grateful for that little insurrection, and it would be difficult to show that the suffragettes displayed any subsequent criminal tendencies … I say hooray for Mrs Pankhurst.’24 This must have been particularly striking in a mildly Democratic but distinctly mainstream newspaper, and in a column that continued to offer its readers homely advice on how best to cook roast potatoes (‘Rub bacon fat on before baking. For mashed potatoes add a small amount of baking powder’).25 Most startling, writing about Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy, which had just appeared, Welles says that ‘it should be sent in a plain wrapper to every living soul who ever claimed to “understand” the Negro … the Negro isn’t somebody to be studied, he’s somebody to be saved … most of those who “understand the Negro” will also tell you that you don’t “understand conditions in the south”.26 These citizens,’ he goes on, ‘should be tied down with banjo strings, gagged with bandannas, their eyes propped open with melon seeds, and made to read Black Boy, word for word.’ The underlying sentiments are unexceptionable, but the strain of violence is disturbing, somehow in excess of his own experience of the iniquities he denounces. Some personal, irrational rage of Welles’s own seems to have attached itself to the cause. In fact the column (as columns will) was revealing rather a lot about their author. The burden of filling the space day-to-day compels the writer to dip rather deeper than he may intend into the bran-tub of his own psyche. The Orson Welles Almanac provides an almost stream-of-consciousness account of his preoccupations, prejudices and passions – as well as, it may be added, an entirely fascinating and unexpectedly comprehensive account of the preoccupations, prejudices and passions of the time in which he was writing.

  His colleagues and employers watched his evolving self-invention with anxiety. ‘I know that Orson can do this job as he can do anything else he sets out to do,’ a manager from the New York Post syndicate wrote, ‘and we have to give him a sufficient period in which to find himself.’27 The questions ‘Who Is Orson?’ and ‘What to Do with Him?’ remained as pressing as ever. Even his researcher, Geneva Cranston, was on hand with advice: Welles, she says, should avoid giving the impression that he even contemplates competing with Leonard Lyons. Welles is ‘the fantastic Mars genius who did such a wonderfully dynamic and intense job on th
e [Roosevelt re-election] campaign … being this phenomenally intelligent and versatile young chap he should have causes, give sharp views, get on a limb occasionally, cause controversy, making it imperative that everybody read him before going on to the cocktail party – in order to argue violently about his clearly stated position on things’.28 Cranston was responsible for a great deal of the material in the column, and its tone was largely set by her and others. ‘People have heard Hitler mention plans to erect a Statue of Liberty as his number one post-war aim,’ runs one of her submissions to him (not, in fact, used).29 ‘But there’s much more to it than choosing a site, Adolph. To begin with, France may not suggest helping you with your little project.’ This is the characteristic tone of many of the ‘Almanac’ columns; it would be hard to say whether the writer was Welles or Cranston. The FBI was, of course, convinced that Welles’s ghost-writers were communists: ‘Ghost writer … is a member of the CP … Almanac is written by Communist who also wrote This Is My Best.’30 The fascination of the FBI with Welles’s authorship of his own work, long before the critics started asking questions about it, is richly ironic.