Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  One senses that all this is an obligatory prelude, a mere hors d’oeuvre to the political meat. The moment Welles reaches this section, his tone changes into one of rising emotionalism containing more than a hint of hysteria; we have already heard a touch of it in his references to Hitler and to Hollywood; indeed, it would be hard to say which of the two he regarded as posing the greater threat to mankind. Speaking of Korea, he analyses American policy lucidly enough, comparing it to its approach to Italy: ‘suppressing Communism by suppressing Democracy’. This, he says, his voice beginning to strangle with outrage, is ‘Simon-pure baloney. We are using Japan to protect Korea from the Koreans. We cannot fight Communism, we can only compete with it.’ By now he is standing four-square on the soapbox that he prophesied at the beginning of the programme. America, he continues, ‘is committed to moral as well as economic leadership. We are the bearers of man’s brightest torch. This is a great moment, the greatest moment in history.’ After this grand peroration, he signs off, hoping ingratiatingly that the audience will want to make hearing the programme a weekly arrangement, and ending with the time-honoured and always faintly improbable formula, ‘I remain Obediently Yours, Orson Welles.’

  The agency was surprisingly delighted with this rather curious show, as was Lear, who wrote to congratulate them on it, at the same time congratulating himself: ‘I’ll bet it is an interesting experience for Welles to have a sponsor who isn’t messing with his show.’13 It must have been, but it didn’t last long. By the third programme it was already thought advisable to preface the show with a disclaimer to the effect that ‘Mr Welles brings his views and opinions which are not necessarily those of Lear Radios.’14 Welles was now broadcasting from his home in Brentwood, an unprecedented arrangement, and apologised in advance for possible irruptions from the cocker spaniel or the eight-month-old Rebecca. His tone is somewhat less intense and somewhat more unguarded than in the first programme: he tells his listeners that the London conference of prime ministers was ‘a wash-out’; that ‘the honeymoon is over for Truman’; and that the movement towards independence in India is too slow. Palestine, he says, is not accepting enough of the Jews of Europe, while the British are starving more than they did in the Blitz. In the story slot, he provides a long and reverent retelling of Bonito the Bull as a peace-offering to those of his listeners whose sensibilities were offended by his earlier mention of bull-fighting. The Flaherty story makes for a very sweet bedtime story, but the general tone of the show is even less clear than that of the launch programme. Welles now does something that he had never done before at the microphone: he dictates to the listener, instead of inviting him or her in. He does to the microphone, in fact, exactly what he later accused Laurence Olivier of doing to the camera: he tries to dominate it.

  Something was clearly not working; from the beginning, listener figures were poor. Welles’s political analyses were those of his newspaper column (which was still running) and, in slightly simplified form, of his editorials in Free World; they were clear and, with hindsight, more often than not accurate. But whatever he might like to think, they were not those of the majority, and the querulousness that crept into his expression of them was an unconscious acknowledgement of this. He sought in his tone to imitate a hoped-for sense of outraged radicalism that was alien to most of his listeners, who might perhaps have responded to a more calmly reasoned discourse. The soapbox was not, as he had promised, occasional; it was his permanent base, and the snippets of movie reviews and anecdotes of the famous were ill-concealed attempts to sugar the pill of hard political lessons.

  Even more problematic, the programmes were not engaging in radio terms; they made uncomfortable listening. By November of 1945, two months into the series, William Lear was writing to Welles that he and his colleagues were deeply distressed at the ratings remaining so low ‘despite the arrival of the good listening season’. He was glad to note less political commentary and more entertainment, but remained disappointed with the show by comparison with ‘the audition record’. He had, he said, been hoping that ‘somewhere along the line you would come up with a whopping new idea – an unorthodox experiment perhaps – or a unique story technique’. He begs Welles to ‘strike a new and unusual radio chord’. What he (and no one) fully grasped was that, in both radio and newspaper journalism, Welles had ceased to be interested in form and was concerned only with content. He felt the eternal passion of the newly converted (whether religiously or politically) that these matters were too important for subtleties of expression: they were self-evident truths, which needed only to be clearly stated to secure the conversion of the listener or reader. Lear and Thackrey of the Post were still thinking of Welles as the Boy Wonder, and were surprised and disappointed when he wasn’t able to come up with dazzling tricks. They required him to create special excitement; they did not expect or want him to be a political guru, but nor did they expect him simply to be efficient, like everyone else. His job was to startle, to amaze. ‘Étonne-nous, Orson!’ was their constant cry. They would not, in fact, let him grow up.

  That it was perfectly possible to combine mature liberal views with experimentation was proved by the work of Welles’s great contemporary, Norman Corwin, but in his own radio work Welles, it seems, was now impatient with artistry: what he wanted were facts and analysis, leading to action. He wanted politics, but he lacked the stamina for the democratic process: when Senator Hiram Warren Johnson died in August 1945, leaving a vacancy, Welles – who had been privately assured that he would be the next senatorial candidate from California – decided against running, promising that he would do nothing to oppose the Democratic candidate’s senatorial ambition ‘inasmuch as [he] felt that Carlson would be far the better candidate’.15 What Welles wanted was direct access to the people, whether through the press or on radio. He pursued the radiophonic path for nearly another year, rising to extraordinary heights of demagoguery, before finally admitting defeat. Meanwhile – mostly from sheer financial necessity – he picked up the pieces of the God-given career he seemed almost completely to have abandoned: that of actor-director.

  Part Three

  WELLESCHMERZ

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The S. T. Ranger

  DURING THE FIFTEEN months of his absence from film, Welles had tried wherever possible to put his talents at the service of his ideals – recording, for example, a series of great democratic speeches for Decca. His attempt to record the Bible (the Mercury Bible, it would have been) never quite got off the ground. His proposal was scorned as both intellectually unstimulating – ‘its attempt to tie in with present history was nothing more than the average minister does every day of the year’ – and formally conventional: ‘with Welles’s great flair for the imaginative, and his undisputed originality … he might have done a more inspiring job’.1 What finally scuppered him was that the project needed the approval of the clergy, but ‘reservations have been expressed about Orson’s personal life’. He was damned both ways: too shocking in life, not shocking enough in art.

  As for the stage, he was still in demand, particularly on what would now be known as the fringe, or off-Broadway: the Theatre Guild offered him the part of jealousy-maddened Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, while James Light of Readers’ Theatre suggested that he do Tamburlaine the Great for them, an inspired idea that would have provided a fine sequel to his Dr Faustus, a play in which his rhetorical gifts – indispensable in Marlowe, if of limited value in Shakespeare – would have found their perfect fulfilment; had they also wanted Welles to direct it, he would surely have done that particularly well, too. He was, both as artist and as man, perfectly Marlovian, a born over-reacher. Shakespeare was on offer, too. The designer Oliver Smith and his partner Paul Feigay, who had just produced the Bernstein-Robbins smash hit On the Town, were keen for Welles to direct and star in King Lear. He turned them all down, but his mind was clearly turning towards the stage again, nearly four years after his sensational production of Native Son. ‘No matter how bad th
e Broadway stage gets,’ he told the New York Times, with an implicit dig at Hollywood, ‘it will always represent a great art form.’ He wanted to write a book about the theatre, he said, but when a potential publisher asked for some advance material, none was forthcoming and negotiations petered out.

  Meanwhile, Welles’s unique position in the profession was being acknowledged from an illustrious and wholly unexpected quarter: the curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art, the formidable Iris Barry, had written to him to say that ‘we should like to organise a one-man exhibition here on the work of a living American artist who has been active both in the theatre and in film … and we would like that one man to be yourself’.2 By that definition, he was indeed the ideal and – until the rise of Elia Kazan and the Method directors – perhaps the only serious candidate for such an accolade. But it is still worth remembering that Iris Barry’s letter arrived just four days after his thirtieth birthday, on 6 May 1945; and that he had been inactive both in theatre and in film for some three years – as a director, at any rate, the capacity in which he was being fêted. He responded to the Museum’s demand for material with swift excitement, immediately assembling and despatching a substantial batch. Then there was no more. A year later they were still asking him if he had anything else. The prospect of such concentrated exposure and analysis may have seemed rather daunting; perhaps it was best to leave the aura of retrospective glory unexamined. The sense of Welles’s limitless but somewhat undefined promise persisted: the Writer’s Yearbook 1946, at any rate, was confident of the future: ‘He is a potential master and will make the greatest contribution to society.’

  So far as film was concerned, Welles was scarcely Hollywood’s forgotten man – his public profile had never been higher – but he seemed to make strenuous efforts actively to distance himself from it. In every interview, and in every medium at his disposal, he had fearlessly and even recklessly criticised it and its product, attacking both producers and directors, demanding a new dispensation. ‘Pictures are in a bad way. They need revitalising,’ he had written in a formal statement in the New York Times. ‘They have no Toscaninis. We should have theatres financed by the Government for private film experimentation and a chain of adult theatres free from Hays Office Code censorship. Films dealing with serious and important subjects should be produced even if the big boys have to be taxed for them.’ His proposals, eminently attractive though they might have been from a Utopian perspective, were scarcely likely to find any direct practical response, at the same time alienating anyone who might be in a position to employ him; it often seemed to be more important to him to be right than to be employed. In fact, short of financing a movie himself (which, given his track record, was a rank impossibility), his only hope was to find an independent producer, a breed that did not exist in the Hollywood of the mid-forties (with the exception of Capra and Chaplin, both of whom produced only their own work). Korda would seem to have been an ideal partner, but since the demise of their plan to shoot War and Peace, their relationship had drifted somewhat. But then Welles fell in with a man – a bargain-basement version of Korda, in many ways – who was embarking on a career that would in the fullness of time result in his being first a pioneer and finally the prince of independent production. Sam Spiegel, like Korda, had been born in a shtetl. After various continental adventures, a brief sojourn in Hollywood and a spell in Palestine, he had served – somewhat to his own surprise – as head of Universal’s European operation in Berlin until Hitler’s assumption of power, at which point he moved to Vienna. In 1939 he returned to Hollywood, where he had earlier worked as a story translator in the nineteen-twenties. His first film as a producer, using the transparent alias of S. P. Eagle, had been the enjoyably European Tales from Manhattan.

  Now, in 1945, he was developing a film with a rather elaborate provenance: based on a story by Victor Trivas, drawn from original material by Decla Dunning and Philip MacDonald, it had been written for the screen, under the title Date with Destiny, by Anthony Veiller and John Huston. Huston, like Welles, had regularly availed himself of the facilities of Spiegel’s fun palace on Hollywood Boulevard, and had already collaborated with him on an unrealised version of the play Russian Life; as a serving officer at the front, he could neither direct The Stranger (as Date with Destiny had become) nor even accept a writing credit. Spiegel had already cast Welles in the central role of Charles Rankin and now – when Welles asked him point-blank – invited him to direct the film too, under certain very stringent conditions, the most critical of which was that the final cut rested with Spiegel. In fact, Welles was quite familiar with this condition; only on Citizen Kane had he had final cut. The financial deal was reasonable, even generous, in itself ($2,000 for each of the eight weeks of the shoot, plus $100,000), but it came with a requirement to indemnify any losses in case of failure to complete the film; in any dispute, Welles agreed to submit to the studio’s will. Moreover, Spiegel also demanded a guarantee to that effect from Rita Hayworth, which she duly gave. These conditions were imposed by William Goetz and Leo Spitz, who created the Haig Corporation specifically to finance 70 per cent of the negative cost of the film. It is reasonable to assume that Bill Goetz, who had produced Jane Eyre and had regarded casting Welles in Tomorrow Is Forever as an enormous coup, was instrumental in his appointment as director, but neither he nor Spiegel was going to allow Welles the slightest opportunity for self-indulgence.

  But Welles had no intention of indulging himself. In later life he dismissed The Stranger as his attempt to prove to Hollywood that he could make a mainstream film under budget and on time, which was no doubt true, but at first he was genuinely enthusiastic about the project. The subject matter had much to recommend it to him, from both a political and an emotional point of view. Rankin, the central character, is not what he seems – always a favourite figure in Welles’s work: he is in fact the disguised mastermind of Hitler’s concentration camps, Franz Kindler, biding his time in a small town in Connecticut before resuming the struggle for world-domination or total annihilation. Nazi resurgence was something of a preoccupation of Welles’s for many years to come, and his newspaper columns were frequently devoted to the danger it represented. The degree of his input into the script has never been clearly determined, though it seems almost certain that he must have been responsible for the speeches in which Rankin/Kindler analyses the nature of the Nazi quest, so familiar are they in theme and cadence to Welles’s own speeches, articles and columns.

  In fact, as with every film Welles made in Hollywood after Citizen Kane, it is difficult to judge his contribution to The Stranger with absolute precision, since none of them was released, or indeed exists today, in exactly the form in which he made them. The screenplay lost thirty-two pages – over an hour of screen time on the usual calculation of two minutes per page – even before filming began, this service being helpfully provided by Spiegel’s nominated editor, the veteran Ernest Nims. Welles managed to assemble a couple of his old associates behind the camera: Perry Ferguson, who had been responsible for kane’s sets (though they are credited to Van Nest Polglase), was the designer; and the cinematographer was Russell Metty, who had shot kane’s very witty trailer (and, incidentally, and rather less wittily, some of the reshoots on The Magnificent Ambersons). Welles tried to get Bernard Herrmann to write the music for him, but he and his wife had just had a second child and were reluctant to come out west; instead Bronislaw Kaper churned out an all-purpose high-romantic suspense score (though he must be forgiven much for invariably referring to the film as The S. T Ranger, in a droll reference to the producer’s alias).

  In front of the camera was a group of actors with none of whom Welles had ever worked before, which was not his ideal situation. Not one of them was his first choice. Wholesome, naive Loretta Young, playing Rankin’s wife Mary, was under contract to Goetz’s Universal Studios and came with the deal; Edward G. Robinson as the Nazi-hunter Wilson was Spiegel’s idea. Welles argued bootlessly to persuade the produc
er that it would be much more interesting to turn the character into a woman, to be played by Agnes Moorehead, but Spiegel never took this suggestion seriously. Welles satisfied his taste for Edwardian acting by asking Philip Merivale (the original Colonel Pickering in Pygmalion, and the first actor to play the part of Higgins in America) to play Judge Longstreet, Mary’s father, meanwhile indulging his passion for vaudevillians by creating a role for the comedian Billy House as Potter, the owner of the town’s soda fountain, the hub of its communal life. Despite the relatively poor opportunities for the high spirits in which he preferred to work, Welles set about making the film with a will, and despite the physical problems involved in erecting a 124-foot tower (claimed at the time to be the tallest set ever made for a film, though surely Ben-Hur and Intolerance must have been larger) and re-creating a Connecticut town on the Universal lot, the film was comfortably completed in its allotted thirty-five days over eight weeks. The discipline he brought to the process is symbolised by his personal discipline in losing some twenty pounds in weight, though this owed more to regular amphetamine injections than to abstemiousness.