Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  The impression throughout the programmes is that Welles was essentially uninterested in making them – not least, no doubt, because he was not officially their director. There had been difficulties during the planning stages: Wayne Tiss from the advertising agency wrote to Jackson Leighter that there had been constant tension between Don Clark, the nominal director, and Welles, culminating in a flare-up. ‘I am going to ask that you be as cooperative with Don Clark as you can,’ wrote Tiss lamely (‘never otherwise,’ Welles had scrawled in the margin, ‘even when Clark was very drunk’), proposing the very awkward (and clearly inaccurate) billing ‘This Is My Best produced in co-operation with Orson Welles’;44 cooperation was the one thing not on offer. Welles had tried to change the format agreed with the client and failed, not perhaps the best state of mind in which to embark on a series. The end came swiftly and without ceremony. Welles wrote to a friend at the advertising agency lamenting that he had been sacked from This Is My Best – which was ‘my best in every sense of the word’ (an egregious piece of self-delusion).45 He claims that there had never been an ugly word, and yet now he’s fired. ‘When an office boy is fired, he gets a note about it. I have yet to receive any sort of note. When a stenographer is let go, she’s called in by regular custom, and given some sort of explanation. I’ve been given no explanation, and after calling repeatedly to ask for one, at least by phone, Wayne Tiss told my agent to request me not to ring him any more, because he wouldn’t be at home to me.’ Welles describes the incident that precipitated the sacking: after reading through Don’t Catch Me, a version of the novel by Richard Powell to which he had the screen rights and of which he had already co-authored a screenplay, he realised that it wouldn’t work, arguing with ‘X’ who was drunk (presumably Don Clark) that they should substitute Ferenc Molnár’s The Guardsman, with himself and Rita Hayworth. Rather surprisingly the client refused to accept this dream package, even though the agency agreed with Welles. ‘Three hours later Bob Braun’ – from Welles’s agency William Morris – ‘came on the set and told me I was fired.’ He had tried to address rumours – since ‘even my agent has been given no reason why I’m fired’ – on the question of music, of casting, and so on:

  You must understand that words have been put into my mouth I never spoke. Lies have been told. Somebody, for his own purposes – in the interests of his own career – has treated me very, very shabbily. There may be two sides to every argument – but there wasn’t an argument – I was sentenced without trial. Speaking of trials, my lawyers assure me I’d win a suit if I brought it against your people, but I think you know that I’m not that kind of a person. I think you know, too, what this affair has cost me in the radio business. The cost to my own feelings is the most painful part of it all.

  The incident was humiliating. How could the noble orator who had moved the nation to tears at the time of Roosevelt’s death only weeks earlier be thus summarily executed, dismissed from a rather unremarkable series and reduced to nearly incoherent pleading with the agency? Clearly there is more to the story than Welles repeats; but equally clearly the company had had enough of him and felt it was simplest to release him. The supreme master was easily dispensable.

  The New York Post was kinder and more patient with him, but here too Welles was perceived as a problem, and the terms in which the problem was posed pierced him to the core. Robert Hall from the New York Post syndicates division wrote to him pointing out the relative failure of the column with the general reader, even after revamping it as Orson Welles Today. ‘Editors did not expect that your column would be regularly on politics and international affairs, for frankly in the public consciousness you are not known as a political writer.46 The average reader knows Orson Welles as one of the leading actors and producers of this century. Why don’t we, as a new lead, attempt to capitalise on this? If you gave us more Orson Welles reporting of contacts in Hollywood, radio, theatre etc. – with an occasional political piece – I believe we could go to town.’ It is extraordinary that the paper had allowed him his head to such a degree on political matters; but the alternative notion that Welles might like to provide an insider’s gossip column was humiliating and repugnant to him. ‘Frankly I haven’t recovered from the shock of your letter,’ Welles replied to Hall.47 ‘I haven’t found it easy to adjust to the fact that the column is a flop. Strangely, I hadn’t suspected it.’ He offers to give up the column. ‘Under any circumstances the column costs me many times as much money as you pay me for it. I’ve thrown over really big financial opportunities in order to serve it loyally and with my best efforts. It takes a huge daily toll, it calls for enthusiasm and love and energy, all of which (no matter how disappointing you find the results) it’s had from me in full measure. Since your letter, those necessary qualities have been very hard to come by.’ He is shaken by the lack of confidence in him that Hall expresses: ‘it was generally believed when we commenced this undertaking that if it failed, it would be because I lost interest in the job. An assumption very flattering to me, as it turns out, since I’ve lost no interest, only readers. From here on in, getting that piece off is the toughest, most thankless day’s work I’ve ever been faced with.’ Above all, he resents the insult to his readers. ‘You say that you want me to write about political matters no more than once a week, and to spend the rest of my wordage on Hollywood and personalities. Of course this would build an audience, but Bob, it wouldn’t be the audience I want to address. There is a serious public. I believe that time could teach that public to take me seriously. You don’t agree. – Where do we go from here?’

  Halls’s proposition was impossible. Welles doesn’t point out the obvious contradiction: an insider who attempts to write a column about his colleagues very swiftly becomes an outsider, shunned by those colleagues and therefore bereft of stories. Moreover, Welles didn’t care to move in those sort of Hollywood circles. His interests at this stage were divided between the political and the sexual: he spent his time on Free World, at the pan-American conferences and in the house of the producer Sam Spiegel, where there was always a ready supply of call-girls of every shape, size and hue. Otherwise, you might find him in a jazz club or at a magic show. But he was not to be found in the habitual purlieus of the movie community; to all intents and purposes, though he continued to live in Los Angeles, he was scarcely part of Hollywood at all and had no gossip to report.

  His columns had occasionally touched on artistic matters, as distinct from showbiz gossip: he reports an almost surreal occasion in Los Angeles when a young woman had leaped up and danced at the side of the stage when Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra played Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream;48 elsewhere he writes about Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, just released in America – ‘it’s the darnedest thing you ever saw’ – and ventures some rather searching observations on film in general.49 He imagines that critics and audiences in the English-speaking world – ‘accustomed as they are to the pallid stylessness of the “realistic” school’ – are likely to be impatient, even moved to giggles by the antics of Ivan and his friends. ‘This is because the arts and artists of our theatre have been so busy for so long now teaching their public to reject anything larger than life unless it be stated in the specific language of glamour and charm.’ He offers a very surprising analysis of what is wrong with the film: it is ‘what goes sour with the work of any artist whose bent is for eloquence. Eisenstein’s uninhibited preoccupation with pictorial effect sometimes leads him, as it has led others who work with the camera, into sterile exercises, empty demonstrations of the merely picturesque.’ The striking similarities between Eisenstein’s work and Welles’s own, both in framings and in montage, had clearly not occurred to him. ‘The Russians go out for the effect itself – and when they find what they’re after – they manage moments of an exclamatory and resonant beauty on a level of eloquence to which our school cannot aspire. When the Russian method fails it is funny; it falls flat on its bottom and we laugh. When Hollywood f
ails, it falls flat, the result is merely dull and we yawn. The star in a Russian studio,’ he continues, still apparently blissfully unaware of any concordance between his subject and himself, ‘is the director. When his camera performs as a principal actor, we are offered great cinema. But when that camera dominates the action at the expense of the rest of the performers, it’s as tiresome as any star hogging close-ups or taking pleasure in the sound of his own voice.’ Because of inferior equipment, the Russian camera must assert itself by what it selects and the manner of selection. ‘The Hollywood camera spends its time lovingly evaluating texture, the screen being filled as a window is dressed in a swank department store.’ So often in the years to come, Welles was to be working with inferior equipment; his cinema became entirely one of selection. He makes another observation of some profundity: ‘When the American movie-maker becomes aware of a discrepancy between his film and the appearance of life, he corrects the difference in favour of “realism”. The search for the direct and the literal produces some of our best effects’ – a path that Welles was rarely to follow.

  In one of the columns, seeking to combine his political and show-business interests, he writes about Jack Benny’s black side-kick, his butler Rochester, a much-loved feature of the radio show.50 Benny is on tour, doing public performances of the show in variety houses around the country. But he has not taken one of the show’s most popular characters with him, for the simple reason that Rochester is black. Welles writes an open letter to his old chum Benny, urging him to take Rochester with him on the road and defy the racists. The column must have been cleared with Benny, with whom Welles had always been (and remained) on the very best of terms. But it is a superb peg on which to hang Welles’s indictment of American attitudes on race; it is exceptionally vivid; he speaks in his own voice, always a good idea in a column. In fact, it feels as if it really might be a letter: direct and personal. From the Post’s point of view it was also about show business and roped in one of the most famous names in America. And it pleased Welles’s bosses.

  Replying to Welles’s letter, Bob Hall of the Post, obviously shaken by Welles’s genuine dismay at his proposal, assures him that he doesn’t want a gossip column from him, but believes that Welles should use the fields ‘in which you are a recognised authority’, citing the column about Jack Benny as the perfect way to deal with a political point:51 ‘through reference to situations and people with which you are thoroughly familiar and – what is more important from a columnar viewpoint – with which readers know you are thoroughly familiar. That gives you prestige from the first word you write, and it puts you in a columning position which few can touch.’ It is not a bad point. Hall’s letter was soon followed by one from Ted Thackrey stressing the importance of the column being personal, and not a mere mouthpiece for political positions. He takes it very seriously. ‘Without question, the daily task of poking into one’s own subconscious and dragging out the mass of intertwined thought and emotion, and setting it forth for public gaze, is for most of us the most severe possible drain upon energy and psyche,’ Thackrey writes.52 ‘The material which pours from you instantly, apparently almost instinctively, will be likely to be truer, warmer and more convincing than anything gathered in your behalf by others.’ He urges Welles to dismiss any organising and fact-collecting staff he might have, and inverts Welles’s argument about not patronising his readers:

  Only one sentence in your letter proved really disturbing to me … this was the suggestion that you prefer to write for the small, select, few ‘serious’ thinkers possessed of very special knowledge and by implication of some special kind of brains. If this were really so, you could not possibly think of a newspaper, or any other general, means of communicating in a democracy as your medium … if by any chance you do feel that there is a gulf between you and the average man who walks the streets which cannot be reached by common words, then, and only then, I should urge you by all means to abandon writing.

  The question of Welles’s relationship to his audience – whether readers, listeners or film-goers – is a central one in his career: his lifelong belief that he had something to say to the broad mass of mankind. The common touch was always to elude him, but by no means for want of trying.

  Also central to his life was the question of his relationship with his fellow-workers. Thackrey touches astutely on that, too. ‘When you do resume your daily writing,’ he ends his letter, ‘I would counsel only one constant, patience, patience, and above all, patience with your fellow-craftsmen … whose opinions are, by the very nature of things, certain to be representative and therefore a clue to the unfinished business always ahead of us all.’ He ends ‘with all our affection and confidence’, which clearly he genuinely feels. This remarkable letter – a lesson from an older man advising a younger who is clearly overwrought and has misjudged the whole situation, but who is not to be punished for it – must have been a shocking one for Welles to receive. In the gentlest possible terms, Thackrey is saying to Welles: if you’re going to come and do our job with us, then do it properly. It’s not a game, a hobby, an indulgence; nor do you have any God-given right to do it: it’s a job, one you have to work at, like any other, despite your – as he says elsewhere in the letter – ‘unusual talents’. It has a certain family resemblance to letters that Welles received from time to time from his guardian Dadda Bernstein and his old headmaster, Skipper Hill.

  Something in the now thirty-year-old Welles still inspired a certain kind of paternal concern in older men, and by contrast with his violently rejecting attitude towards authority figures, he received the letter with a sort of gratitude. ‘For three weeks,’ he replied to Thackrey, ‘I’ve been trying to find some answers to your letter – it was a very kind and wise letter.’53 He attempts to redefine his position about his readers. ‘All I meant was I wanted to write a column for the people who read editorials; that I didn’t care about the fans … but the sum of my breast-beating letter was simply this: you are unhappy with my work and I think it’s the best I can do. Therefore why not drop me quietly overboard? I still think you ought to. Maybe,’ he ponders, stating what to someone else might have been an obvious truth, ‘the only way to do a good column is to do nothing else.’ But of course he can’t afford to do that. ‘Maybe if I spent half of five days on a single Saturday piece, the result would better deserve your confidence and your news space. I do so much value your friendship and Dolly’s [Dorothy Schiff, Thackrey’s wife, and owner of the Post], I so much wanted to do everything you believed I could do … maybe if I do quite well I’m not letting you down as much as if I continue poorly – please tell me how I can be fairest to you.’ Here is yet another Welles, boyish and rather touching. A week later he wires Thackrey: HOW WAS LAST COLUMN? DID IT HAVE ENOUGH PERSONALITY? IS IT IN THE DIRECTION YOU HAVE INDICATED? MUCH LOVE.54 The column had indeed changed somewhat; Welles’s own voice became clearer and more confident, without losing its political edge. He ranged further than he had: from time to time he managed a mention of Hollywood, though in far from gossipy vein.

  One of the best of his Post columns, ‘His Gorgeousness, the Bey of Beverly Hills’, in which he invents a producer who sums up everything he despises, is a devastatingly frank attack on the system Welles so hated and to which he was nonetheless still somehow indivisibly attached.55 ‘The sleep of the great man is guarded by private police, he has worn only a small percentage of his shirts, his race horses are happier than his lady friends and almost as numerous. Yet he is a man of simple tastes. Look at his movies and you’ll see what I mean.’ One day a female tourist asks Gorgeous George, ‘Why don’t you make better movies? Why are they getting worse and worse instead of better and better?’ He murmurs, ‘Unions,’ but she continues unstoppably, ‘I think it’s because you make too much money, or rather, because you don’t lose enough to learn anything.’ A fascinating complaint from Welles, who knew all about losing money for studios. ‘Silence followed this, only broken by the tiny patter of dropping options a
ll over the valley.’ The female tourist resumes, ‘I’m tired of your telling us that we have 12-year-old minds. America is now the strongest nation the world has ever known, and the movies are a greater power than the atomic bomb. If you deserve exclusive rights to this whole empire of ideas, why don’t you prove it by growing up a little? The army is not supposed to be a place you join for artistic freedom, but your people have produced better pictures in uniform than you ever let them make on your lot.’ Welles then advances an argument very familiar in the late twentieth century, but an outrageous one for 1945: ‘Every other big business spends lots of income on research. You make your artists experiment on the job. If what they try doesn’t work, you ground them. And they don’t get to try much. The old stuff still sells, because there isn’t anything else on the market. That’s why I think you need a few more flops, even a little competition.’ The right to fail, a phrase coined by George Devine at the Royal Court Theatre in London in the mid-nineteen-fifties, was an idea whose time had most certainly not yet come in Hollywood, 1945; would indeed never come to Hollywood in any period. In Welles’s column, the tourist woman, disappointed, leaves. Gorgeous George, the Bey of Hollywood, changes the subject. ‘I have it on the best authority,’ he says, chillingly, ‘that there never was in Europe during the occupation – what you’d call a real underground.’ The piece is powerful, precise and of course quite suicidal – the last line above all.

  Considered as journalism, however (especially by the criteria of Ted Thackrey and Bob Hall), it was exactly what was wanted: intelligent, trenchant criticism, on a subject on which Welles could easily be counted an expert; it was controversial, but not hectoring. Subsequent pieces, if not so directly personal, were similarly individual: a strong pro-union piece, rather clumsily dramatised, contained a charming (and accurate) description of Clifton’s Cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles, which suggests a hitherto unsuspected power of observation in Welles, though his evocation of this working-class playground teeters dangerously on the brink of contempt: this is not precisely the popular culture that Welles wished to endorse: