Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  Clifton’s. A marvellous place where birds sing over chronic organ music as homey and dreary as the complaint of a vacuum sweeper.56 There is a tame waterfall and free birthday cakes. The food is free, too, if you can’t afford to pay, and you may take your tray into a place called Tropical Hut, where, the sign says, it rains every fifteen minutes. The customers are mostly farm folks, visiting or moved out to California with just enough for their old age. When they’re finished eating they walk round under the neon trees and read the poetry and philosophical maxims, bronze samplers studding the bright plaster walls. The ladies are given leis of paper flowers to ear around their necks, and at five o’clock there is community singing. I don’t imagine they expect much more from Heaven.

  Prelapsarianism, so central to Welles’s world-view if it concerns elderly vaudevillians or holiday hotels in Illinois villages, does not necessarily embrace other people’s innocent delights.

  In another column, he invents a supposedly anti-union Aunt Lou, disturbed by the rash of strikes that preceded the general peace. ‘It’s always “Labor trouble”,’ writes Welles, ‘never “management trouble”.57 Aunt Lou, the men and the women on the picket lines aren’t deliberately conspiring against our personal comfort. Because they want a better livelihood doesn’t mean at all that they’re plotting the overthrow of prosperity … but keep your hat on, Aunt Lou. It’s been worse before, and it’s bound to get better.’ But his primary concern is with foreign policy. Again and again he comes back to the question of America’s power in the world; in an Open Letter to Jimmy Byrnes, now Secretary of State, whom he has consistently attacked, Welles attributes Russia’s current anxieties to the failure of America and Britain to impose a tough peace on Germany, leading the Russians to believe that ‘we’re figuring on the possibility of going to war again – and not with Germany’.58 It is the first frost presaging the start of the Cold War, and Welles contemplates the loss of all the hopes of which he and his colleagues in the Popular Front had dreamed: ‘From where I sit, Mr Secretary, it looks to me like Russia is wrong about a lot of things, but I do think – and most of my neighbours agree with me – that since we carry the biggest stick in the world, we could afford to speak a trifle softly. You don’t have to shout, Mr Secretary, you can lower your voice for a minute. Our back isn’t against the wall. We’re big and strong and rich but we can afford to make a few more friends in the world if we want to influence people.’

  There is chilling prescience in Welles’s analysis of the situation: some months earlier, reporting from Bretton Woods, he had written: ‘We are the world’s greatest production plant and the largest creditor nation.59 Without sensible economic agreements between England and the US, Mr Luce’s prediction of the American century will come true and God help us all. We’ll make Germany’s bid for world supremacy look like amateur night. And the inevitable retribution will be on a comparable scale.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  An Occasional Soapbox

  IN ADDITION TO the newspaper column, Welles had continued throughout 1945 to pursue his political interests, preparing for a new radio programme in which he was actively encouraged to address current affairs, making speeches across the country, and editing Free World magazine; for a while he was authorised correspondent for the Rio newspaper Oglobo. In fact, Welles was one of a number of contributing editors to Free World under the general supervision of Dolivet, and could be relied upon to run up a piece on pretty well any subject of current concern. A typical wire from Dolivet requesting an editorial reads: EITHER LATIN AMERICA OR PALESTINE WITH EMPHASIS BRITISH OR OTHER MANDATES NO LONGER CAN BE KEPT AS EXCLUSIVE PRIVILEGE OF RULING NATION;1 Welles chose Latin America. The cover of the Special Peace Issue of the magazine, devoted to fears about the bomb and other chemical means of warfare, carried the headline FROM MARTIAN BROADCAST TO ATOM BOMB and focused specifically on Welles’s own history,2 recalling the War of the Worlds panic. ‘Among the closing lines of Mr Welles’s broadcast was this one: “We annihilated the world before your very ears.” By now the gigantic hoax can become a terrible reality and the author is writing in deadly seriousness about the important decisions humanity has to make since the mastery of atomic energy.’ Welles’s piece itself ends with a curious rhetorical flourish, which might have worked as oratory, but whose grandiloquence seems rather overwrought on the page:

  The alternative to Chaos is grander than all dreams, and we are greater than our dreams. We, the living, are the ancestors of a people who will be, truly, men like Gods. We will not fail them. Among all creatures, the human has the marvellous bent for the art of survival. The universe is none too big for him. Man is no puny thing. He is greater than all his tools. He burned himself with the first fire, but there came a day when he built a forge and he made a plow. Today man turns the key in the last padlock of power. Tomorrow he will be worthy of his freedom.

  Elsewhere he takes a slightly more pugnacious tone. ‘We know that for some ears even the word “action” has a revolutionary twang, and it won’t surprise us if in some quarters we’re accused of inciting them. Free World is very interested in riots. Free World is interested in avoiding them. We call for action against the cause of riots. Law is the best action, the most decisive.’3 His conclusion reverts to the cause that he espoused above all others throughout his career as a commentator, and indeed throughout his life, with truly admirable tenacity, lending his name and his authority to it whenever he could, often at considerable danger to himself. ‘This is our proposition: that the sin of race hate be solemnly declared a crime.’ He was something of a beacon to his fellow-liberals, and his presence on various progressive platforms was perpetually in demand. At the beginning of 1944, Will Rogers Jr had written to Welles asking him to be the narrator for We Will Never Die, a concert protesting against Nazi slaughter of the Jews, assuring him: YOUR APPEARANCE WILL MAKE PROFOUND IMPRESSION.4 In similar vein, though with a slightly different catchment area in mind, Ray Pierre of Glamour magazine asked Welles to write a piece on tolerance in society. ‘We are in complete sympathy with everything you have been saying in your lectures and your column in the New York Post … we feel that your name as well as your point of view would strike home with our young women readers – a pretty wide audience that sadly needs your message.’5

  The piece that Welles wrote for Pierre, ‘Mrs Wentworth,’ is one of his most extended pieces of political journalism; read by him, in a voice of sweet reason, its impact would have been overwhelming, though it is powerful enough on the page. ‘Mr Thomas Martin Wentworth is a popular member of his country club. Mrs Wentworth is perfectly charming, and so are the children. Dinner at the Wentworths if not exactly an event is a delightful way to spend an evening as you probably know. The wines are pleasant, the food excellent, the conversation sufficiently diverting to stave off bridge and home movies. But you must be careful what you say to Mrs Wentworth: she comes from the south …’6 Welles then reveals that she has a black half-brother. ‘The difference in skin pigmentation will surely seem to the students of this era in centuries to come the quaintest of all possible reasons why a sister should expect her brother to step off the sidewalk and avert his eyes when she appears before him … our textbooks and our teachers are careful not to give “offence” to Mrs Wentworth. Our movies and our radios religiously avoid the very stuff which alone can save the Wentworth young …’ The husband is tolerant:

  What in God’s name does Mr Wentworth have to tolerate? The fact there are people different from himself alive in the world … no, in Mr Wentworth’s little world, there isn’t anybody to ‘tolerate’ except Mrs Wentworth. If she has read these words to this bitter end, I know she will be screaming now that I’m one of those Communist Yankee agitators who doesn’t know ‘conditions’. Dear Mrs Wentworth, I’m half a southerner and despite the fact that I do know ‘conditions’, I’m not even a quarter Communist. I believe our American system can work. But it won’t until you, Mr Wentworth, and you, Mrs Wentworth, sit down and shut up long en
ough to let our educators teach your children how wrong their parents are.

  The curious touch of menace, of a veiled threat, is characteristic. (His casual claim to be half-Southern is another charming piece of self-fabulism. There are so many halves to Welles that by this stage he must have added up to several people – a whole family, perhaps.) His anti-racism led him to become spokesman for the Citizens’ Committee for the Defense of Mexican-American Youth, to combat anti-Mexican agitation stirred up in, among other places, the Hearst press, which had been instrumental in drawing attention to the celebrated Sleepy Lagoon incident in August 1942, when seventeen young Mexican-Americans had been arrested for murder. Two of the defendants were beaten up by the police; they and the others were convicted. Welles wrote a simple but eloquent preface to a pamphlet published by the otherwise unknown Mercury Printing Press; in October 1944, thanks in large part to Welles’s agitation, the court overturned the convictions. He was, in this as in so many other areas of his life, apparently fearless; everything he did or wrote was duly recorded by the FBI, which was scandalised to note that Welles was going to make three short films for the Mercury Theatre, to be shown throughout the country in public schools, ‘on the contribution of the Negroes to American music and letters’.7

  He pursued a heavy programme of public speaking. This was not a purely idealistic enterprise: his highly successful anti-fascist lecture tour at the beginning of the year had earned him 70 per cent of the gross over $300, so financial necessity and political progressiveness were not mutually exclusive. But welcome though the emolument undoubtedly had been, it was not the driving motive: he derived great personal satisfaction from addressing large numbers of people on what he rightly regarded as urgent themes, relishing the directness of communication and the chance to sway people’s opinions; naturally he was powerfully thrilled by the contact with large crowds, sometimes as many as 5,000 strong. He was Charles Foster Kane, but on the right side. The impact he made was immense. The celebrated educationalist, Helen Keller, both deaf and blind, had written to Welles that her assistant ‘had your speech put into Braille for me and I have read it over and over. It startles me with the thunder of a waking social conscience … your spirit of prophecy inspires working faith.’8 Welles had been introduced to her and displayed the courteousness that was habitual to him when dealing with older people. ‘It is delightful to recall the knightly gallantry with which you guided me through the surging crowd at the stage entrance. And there was in me an emotion too deep for words as I sensed their huge love pressing round us and hands touching us lightly but eloquent in their dumbness.’ She sensed in him a kindred spirit. ‘There is nothing like the affection of a great crowd, and I know neither you nor I would change it for any earthly treasure – except their increased welfare and happiness.’

  This continuing absorption in political life had at one point seemed a bond uniting Welles and Rita Hayworth (their Christmas Card for 1944 read ‘To the Spanish Republicans and other anti-Fascist refugees, my wife and I send greetings. Will you join us? Just fill out the enclosed check and mail it to the joint anti-Fascist Refugee Committee immediately. Your donation will mean relief and rehabilitation for those first fighters against fascism. Thank you and the season’s greetings to all of you. Signed Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles’). But now it only served to widen the rift between them, taking him away from her both emotionally and geographically. The FBI, which maintained a lively interest in Welles’s sex life, reported that when he was in San Francisco for the United Nations Conference he spent ‘considerable evenings engaged in extra-marital duties with [name deleted], former Main Street burlesque striptease artist, who recently promoted herself to a higher type of night club appearances in the city. Also sometime ago when Welles appeared in San Diego in connection with a bond tour, he took some girl other than his wife, to be with him there.’9 He absent-mindedly abandoned his elaborate considerateness for his wife. When her mother Volga Cansino, with whom Hayworth had such a dangerously complex and unresolved relationship, suddenly died, Welles failed to return to Los Angeles for the funeral. His indifference to his new daughter was absolute, and when Hayworth occasionally joined him in New York or Washington, she found him wholly absorbed in conferences with his advisors. To remind him of her existence, she would throw explosive tantrums, which had the desired effect in the short term – he would disappear into the bedroom to comfort her while his collaborators tiptoed embarrassedly away – but which in the only slightly longer term drove him further and further away from her.

  The paradoxes of their unlikely relationship had started to manifest themselves very early: the more he embraced needy mankind, the less able he seemed to extend his concern to the individuals for whom he was personally responsible. Welles had been drawn to Hayworth because of her sexually iconic quality; conquering her had boosted his image and his ego. He had courted her by gently penetrating beyond the goddess and the star and by urging her to reveal her private hopes, disappointments and dreams. She was attracted to him because he was the first man who seemed willing to listen to her and treat her as something other than a sex-object. Having won her, Welles rapidly lost interest in the Pygmalion aspect of their relationship. Initially fascinated with the disparity between the potency of her image and her utter lack of inner confidence, between her public glamour and her private homeliness, he soon found the complexities of her character distinctly anaphrodisiac, her urgent demand for affirmation through sex the opposite of enticing. Welles wanted to pursue, not to be pursued – least of all by his own wife. She thus found herself married to possibly the only heterosexual man in the Western world who did not want to go to bed with her. Hayworth’s former husband had encouraged her to advance her career – and thus their joint bank balance – by sleeping with other men as well as himself, a profoundly disturbing and damaging proposition; Welles’s contribution to her battered psyche was that – having discovered, to his surprise, that she was at heart a housewife and a mother – he felt that providing her with a daughter had discharged his marital responsibilities. Being constitutionally incapable of doing anything that didn’t interest him, he largely absented himself from the relationship, which of course compounded her already advanced feelings of abandonment. A further, and perhaps crucial, complication in their situation was that in business terms she was worth a great deal more than he was, and was infinitely more famous and popular. All the more reason to absent himself from her ambit, though he was not above borrowing large sums of money from her. As her cronies from the studios reported more and more of Welles’s infidelities to her (including the semi-public liaison with Judy Garland, a surprising choice if it was complexity and emotional neediness that he was running away from), Hayworth began to drink heavily; often, inebriated, she would drive around the Hollywood Hills at reckless speeds, once with Welles (on one of his rare visits home) as her terrified passenger.

  His real life was elsewhere, in the bars and clubs, on the stump or editorialising. The new radio programme, frankly entitled Orson Welles’s Commentary, was his final attempt to find the radiophonic pulpit he had been seeking for some years now. Lear Radios, his new sponsor, had taken the precaution of having him record a sample programme, with which they were well pleased: ‘[an] expert blending of the humorous and the dramatic with abundance of human interest,’10 wrote William Lear, which gave promise of ‘something that radio sadly needs, namely, a new type of entertainment. I don’t know of anyone in the country better suited to supply such a need than you.’ Clearly Lear and the agency had the highest hopes for the programme: they were paying Welles the startling sum of $1,200 a week, rising to $1,700, for his ‘commentary on affairs of national interest, books, plays, films, and relative subjects and personalities involved therein’.11 The programme precisely fulfilled this brief, and was something quite new in Welles’s use of the medium, his first solo broadcast, an exercise in minimalism alongside his ramshackle attempts at variety shows and his ambitious and sometimes radical literary
dramatisations. This is radio pared down to its bare essentials, designed as a nearly abstract exercise in his exceptional ability (in Arthur Miller’s words quoted earlier) ‘to seem to climb into’ the microphone.

  The first show opens with great directness, but the sudden intimacy – instead of being engaging – is almost oppressive, a far cry from the infectious actor-managerial introductions to the Mercury Theatre on the Air riding on the adrenalin of Bernard Herrmann’s souped-up version of the opening bars of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto, or the bright and breezy welcomes to The Orson Welles Almanac. ‘Hello,’12 he says, ‘this is Orson Welles,’ and it is as if he has phoned you personally. ‘I’ve come to call, I’ve come to visit with you at this time for a few minutes and, with your permission, every week have a little conversation and talk about this and that. I’m going to speak my mind about the news. And, you know, we don’t have to agree on everything to be friends. This is a free country after all. I’m no more of an expert than you are, I haven’t got a stable of spies working for me in Washington or Hollywood, though I’ve got a whole lot of interesting friends and I meet a lot of people.’ As a point of fact, he did, as it happens, have a network of informants in Washington (though not in Hollywood); Geneva Cranston and her associates had been hired again to keep Welles au courant with events. He defends the right of actors to have a voice of their own, adding that he personally broadcasts because ‘a few people are doing a lot of harm to the things I believe in and love and want to serve. I don’t believe I speak for a minority.’ He speaks, of course, of a Free World. ‘You may find me on an occasional soap-box but you may be sure that I’ll be speaking in behalf of those notions drafted into our constitution and our Bill of Rights. I’ll try to have a story for you each week, I’ll tell you about a new film, and then I’ll say something about the trouble in Korea.’ The sponsor says ‘a few interesting words’. The new film he plugs is Robert Siodmak’s The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry, featuring Geraldine Fitzgerald whom he first met, he reveals, when they made their debut in the same theatre in Dublin. She may not have the starring role, he says, because ‘the people who push the buttons and push people around in Hollywood may not have decided that she is a star yet, but she’s a real actress’. The film is a mystery story, he tells us, a better one than the week’s other mystery story: ‘Frankly,’ he asks, ‘who cares whether Herr Schikelgruber is dead or alive?’ He reports that he’s off to see a bull-fight across the border, in Mexico, ‘with Jo and Lenore Cotten and my wife’. There is much mention of Rita Hayworth, though their relationship, as we have seen, was by now in rapid free-fall. He speaks of bull-fighting uncomfortably and defensively, knowing that most of his fellow-Americans find it repugnant, admitting that he’s tried it out in Mexico and Spain – ‘pre-Franco, of course’ – and ‘recounting a long and unamusing story about a legendary bull-fighter of his acquaintance, who was locked out of his hotel room in downtown LA wearing only his towel.