by Simon Callow
In truth, things were not going well with the column. Jackson Leighter, Welles’s manager, valiantly assured Ted Thackrey of the constantly improving response to the column, as Welles moved way from reporting and editorialising towards a more personal style. Then, in a little bit of a giveaway, he suggested that Thackrey might like to buy a small magazine for Welles along the lines of I. F. Stone’s Weekly or – in England – Claud Cockburn’s The Week – which of course would have been the perfect medium for his purposes, though financially rewarding neither for Welles nor for his proprietor;31 it would also have forfeited the mass audience that had always been Welles’s target. The figures were inarguable, however: subscribers to the syndicate were cancelling left, right and centre. The vision of riches beyond the dreams of avarice vanished: from now on, Welles would earn only his $300 per week for writing the column, a derisory reward for the time and labour involved – time during which he could have been earning large sums in either radio or film. But the column mattered deeply to him. It was an article of faith that it was possible to reach the general public with progressive views that essentially, he believed, reflected their own values. He had simply not found the right approach: the medium, not the message, was at fault.
To whip up interest, he started to look for controversial subjects, and found one in an unexpected place: the numerous German-language newspapers that proliferated, particularly in Welles’s own Mid-West. He found that they continued to take a broadly pro-Nazi line. The column he wrote about them provoked angry responses, as had his earlier assertion that the Founding Fathers of the United States had been torn between adopting German and English as the official language. He quoted the official Soviet newspaper, Izvestia: ‘These German newspapers which live on the hospitality of the American people are being given active support by the reactionary trio of Hearst, Patterson and McCormick.’32 His contempt for the two newspaper proprietors was well established; Patterson was a right-wing columnist who had declared the newly instituted midnight curfew a curtailment of Americans’ liberty. ‘I guess I don’t get around enough because I don’t happen to know that kind of people,’ writes Welles, disingenuously. ‘If you’re acquainted with somebody like that, please tell him that while he’s pouting about being properly entertained after midnight, tell them …’, and Welles lists the heroic and selfless activists of the war effort, children, blinded veterans and so on. It is a little surprising to find him claiming not to know anybody who demands to be entertained after midnight. Everything anyone knew about him might have suggested that he might have been exactly such a person himself. Sometimes he literally seems to forget who he is.
After three months the column itself underwent a change of identity, scrapping the tenuously maintained pretence of the ‘Almanac’ format, and becoming Orson Welles Today, a straightforward political commentary. The first column under the new name was a fairly opportunistic response to a brouhaha that Noël Coward had brought on himself with publication of his war journal Middle East Diary, in which he had singled out a young Brooklyn serviceman for showing outward signs of discomfort when all around were being bravely stoical. Welles was stung into action by reports that Coward had been visiting hospitals, introducing himself to the patients and leaving then with the regal words, ‘All right – go ahead.’ Welles bridled angrily at this, creating an imaginary GI called Brooklyn Joe:
I’ve read most of Noël’s book Dear Middle East Diary (or whatever it’s called) and some of Joe’s letters back home.33 Both want the whole damn mess finished up as soon as possible. But Joe wants to get back to Brooklyn and Noël wants to get back to 1928. There’s another important difference. Joe’s been spending a lot of time where it’s muddy and unpleasant and Noël … well, Noël’s done everything Noël could do in this war – everything except the easiest thing which was to be a little generous to some very gallant gentlemen who happened to be foreigners … but Noël is a small town boy, and there is no provincialism like that of the international set … between Joe and Noël looking at each other in the hospital is a difference greater than race or class, graver than any insult or injury, real or imagined. Joe and Noël belong in two different worlds, all right, but they also belong in different wars.
It’s pretty nasty, a reflection of Welles’s anti-imperialist views (which frequently surfaced in the columns in attacks on Churchill’s Toryism), but a curiously cheap way of whipping up sentiment; for the most part, liberated from the obligation to be ingratiating, Welles pursued an increasingly hectoring manner in the column, often falling into the conventional rhetoric of the Left.
Perhaps this was not unconnected to developments in his own political life, which had now taken a more practical turn. Louis Dolivet had laboured long and hard to identify his Free World Association with the idea of a United Nations Organisation; at the end of April, the San Francisco Conference was convened to progress the work of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference and bring the Organisation into existence. Free World – and Welles in particular – insisted that the UNO was the world’s only, and last, chance for a better world. ‘Remember that there is no choice between Plan “A” and Plan “B”,’ he wrote in a column.34 ‘There is only the choice between Security Organisation Number One … and World War Three.’ In Shaping Tomorrow’s World Dolivet had defined Free World’s position, acknowledging America’s inevitable re-eminence in the post-war world. Warning his readers of the dangers of world control or world domination through financial or economic means, he observes, ‘there is no doubt that this leadership idea could degenerate later into imperialistic tendencies, or could be considered such by other nations’.35 Dolivet sharply states the difficulty with American liberalism: ‘whenever one injustice is committed, the American liberals stand up as one man in defence of the victim. They have, by doing this, written glorious pages in the history of freedom. But once this particular fight is over, they disappear nobody knows where. The man in the street who was moved and convinced by their arguments writes letter after letter. He offers to join, but nobody is there to reply. They are organising committees for the best causes in the world, but the committees disappear as rapidly as they come.’ Dolivet organised a pre-conference forum in Washington, spread over several Sundays, with further sessions in Hollywood.
Welles, whom Dolivet had been diligently preparing for the event, was installed as ‘Moderator of broadcasts and mass meetings’; he duly wrote to Roosevelt on behalf of Free World (on behalf, in fact, of the world, he said) to ask, a little fawningly, for a message for the forum: ‘Personally it would make me most happy and I know of nothing that would make me more grateful than a direct message from the President to the people of the world.’36 Roosevelt, in response to this impassioned appeal, wrote back (with due approval from the State Department):
April will be a critical month in the history of human freedom, It will see the meeting in San Francisco of a great conference of the United Nations – the nations united in this war against tyranny and militarism.37 At that conference, the peoples of the world will decide, through their representatives, and in response to their will, whether or not the best hope for peace the world has ever had will be realised. Discussions by the people of this country, and by the peoples of the freedom-loving world, of the proposals which will be considered at San Francisco, are necessary, are indeed essential, if the purpose of the people to make peace and to keep peace is to be expressed in action.
This was exactly what Welles believed and what he wanted Roosevelt to say. The forum duly took place; the participants in the broadcasts he chaired included the US Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, the prominent Soviet apologist Ilya Ehrenburg, the British Deputy Prime Minister Clement Atlee, former Soviet ambassador Maxim Litvinov (his analysis of the German threat now amply verified), the war journalist William L. Shirer and the liberal columnist Sam Grafton. Blue Network claimed a listenership of 500 million. Welles’s sense of being, if not centre of the stage of history, at the very least in the wings, was overpowering
; he grew a beard as a mark of his seriousness, and maintained a relatively low-key presence, stage-managing the event rather than producing it. He was also editor of the daily newspaper published by Free World at the San Francisco United Nations Conference. ‘This newsletter,’ he wrote in the first edition, ‘is particularly important because, unfortunately, the daily newspapers in San Francisco which will be the first contact every morning of the foreign delegates with American public opinion will be largely unfree, if not hostile, to the idea of true world co-operation … the San Francisco conference is without doubt the major political event of our time.38 All those who are not engaged in direct fighting or war work must give the fullest amount of their time to facilitate a successful conclusion of the United Nations.’ It is the familiar voice of political activism; Welles deeply felt the importance of the Conference, with reason, poised as the world was between the possibility – the tenuous possibility – of a more hopeful future and a past in which global nightmare had been so narrowly averted. The war was not yet over, but the outcome was a fairly safe bet.
At the Conference, as he reported to the readers of Orson Welles Today, he had seen the footage of gas chambers and concentration camps, and struggled to give a calm account of it: ‘The heaped-up dead in evidence.39 The burdened ovens. The ingenious machinery for the gift of pain. The eyeball blinking in the open grave … Patton and Bradley, their eyes choked full of this. Eisenhower, moving slowly, with immense dignity, through the long tableau. A huge black anger knocking with heavy blows on the commander’s heart.’ He cannot pretend to any objectivity about the Germans, ‘the solid citizens. They are dressed like people. You recognise the costumes … these creatures are less alive than the dead they have been called to view and bury.’ In the film, they are required to go and look at the evidence of the horrors that their fellow-countrymen have perpetrated:
The Military Police are gentle with the herrenvolk. You realise that they need to be or they would strike them down, each with a single blow … one place of torture, you will learn, was camouflaged as a madhouse. Here the most grisly of all Grand Guignol conceits was realised: here the wardens were the lunatics. You watch the chief of these being interviewed in the newsreel. The subject is poison. He is very businesslike. Between phrases he touches his upper lip with a fat lizard’s tongue. The frown is professional. He is the man of science called for expert consultation, only the poison gives him away. And his chin. It is wet with drool … the newsreels testify to the fact of quite another sort of death, quite another level of decay. This is a putrefaction of the soul, a perfect spiritual garbage. For some years now we have been calling it Fascism. The stench is unendurable.
Welles was a gifted reporter, as these and other despatches make clear, a better (or at any rate more compelling) reporter, perhaps, than he was an analyst. He saw the world around him, and he dramatised it. When he was unable to do so, his writing became conventional, his more politically tendentious reports from the Conference – on Japan, on unemployment – lacking the vividness of his personal reportage.
Then quite suddenly he was knocked sideways by an event that devastated him, both personally and politically. On 12 April 1945, during a short recuperative break in Warm Springs, Georgia, Franklin Roosevelt died of a massive cerebral haemorrhage. America – and indeed the world – was aware that the President was in poor health, though Welles had given a broadcast a few weeks earlier reporting him to have been in fine fettle: ‘Mr Roosevelt isn’t 29 years old, but he’s tougher than I am.’40 The President’s sudden demise so soon after re-election and his recent highly publicised participation in the Yalta Conference was nonetheless a considerable shock: military victory, of which he was widely felt to be the principal architect, was within sight; and those like Welles and his political allies who dreamed of a new dispensation once hostilities ended were terrified that Harry Truman, the conservative backwoodsman and political fixer with no discernible radical tendencies who now became President, would allow the golden chance to slip through his fingers, squandering Roosevelt’s hard-won achievements. In the slogan of the time, the winning of the peace was every bit as important as the winning of the war, and Welles had the darkest suspicions of the forces of reaction within his own country and in the world at large. On a personal level, he had been profoundly impressed by his contact with the elegantly charismatic Roosevelt and flattered by the great man’s playful suggestion that Welles himself should run for the highest office. When Kathleen Tynan asked him if he regretted not becoming President, Welles said, ‘No, not for a moment.41 It’s no fun. Roosevelt was the last one to have fun – but to do that, you’d have to be Roosevelt.’ Welles responded to a kind of gallantry, a certain patrician insouciance in Roosevelt that fully activated, as few men did, his considerable capacity for hero-worship. He gave free rein to his feelings when, remarkably, he was called on by CBS to record an immediate response to the President’s death.
His eulogy begins with an account of Moses bringing his people to the Promised Land. ‘Today another servant of the Lord and of his people entered history.42 He’s gone. We can’t believe it but he’s gone. The dark words throw their shadow on the human race; Franklin Roosevelt is dead. His, the Mosaic tragedy of looking upon a land to which he’s led a hopeful people – even to its borders – and which he may not enter. The land is neither Canaan nor Utopia. It is called Democracy.’ Using quotations from Roosevelt himself as headings for his subsequent paragraphs, Welles continues: ‘Only a little while ago he wrote this to me: “April will be a critical month in the history of human freedom.”’ Welles recalls ‘the tremendous labours of an American president, of a commander-in-chief, of the master architect for an abundant world’. The speech ends: ‘Two days before he was elected for his last term of office, he asked me to read these words by the Apostle Paul: “My brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of his Might … take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God.”’ Welles’s address was simply phrased, simply delivered, dignified by biblical echoes and cadences, and it moved America. He does not overstate his personal relationship with Roosevelt, but it is striking evidence of the unique position he occupied in American public life, despite his current lack of professional profile. Which other actor/director could possibly have discharged such a task? And who could have done it with such distinction? He may have been in the wilderness, but his presence there was highly conspicuous; when the occasion demanded it, as here, he was able and qualified to speak for America.
The following night, he was called on to pay more formal tribute: his speech on that occasion was both more considered and more overwrought. ‘Something is on its way on a slow train from Georgia … tonight we do it reverence, this lifeless relic of our living history, this dear memento. Tomorrow these tears should celebrate the thing, the great and nameless thing which gives it meaning. This thing is the American truth which Franklin Roosevelt stood for – truth – you’ll remember – held to be self-evident. We dare not lag behind, you and I – we must keep up with it – for it goes marching on. Franklin Roosevelt needs everything you have to give him but your tears.’ With some audacity Welles managed a plug for his organisation. ‘We must move on beyond mere death to that free world which was the hope and labour of his life. Something is on its way from Georgia to the Capitol, but Franklin Roosevelt never left your home.’43
After this emotional climax, life, as Welles had said, went on. The Free World Forum continued, as did Orson Welles Today. But his radio career – ironically, in view of his recent universally regarded broadcast tributes to Roosevelt – almost immediately suffered a humiliating setback. His relationship with the medium of which he was acknowledged to be supreme master, and which was also his most dependable source of income, had rapidly declined since the unhappy experience of The Orson Welles Almanac. Early in 1945, he had recorded a series of eight programmes of political commentary under the sponsorship of Eversharp razors, but they had never been broadcas
t. He then embarked on a series called This Is My Best, sponsored by Cresta Blanca wines, a return to the format of his glory days, the Mercury Theatre on the Air and The Campbell Playhouse, though significantly, at thirty minutes, half the length of either of those programmes. As before, they consisted of literary adaptations, with a couple of original scripts thrown in: the classics were The Master of Ballantrae and The Diamond as Big as the Ritz; there were two new pieces of no great account and a very mild satire on Hollywood bureaucracy and, finally, Walt Disney’s Snow White. In fact, none of it was of any great account, not even the opening show, The Heart of Darkness, which had had such a key place in Welles’s development, and of which he had already made a striking version. He incorporated various elements of his unfilmed screenplay into the new version, but in radiophonic form they are somewhat limp, Welles’s own performances as both Marlow and Kurtz (a double that would have featured in the film as well) were sleepy.