Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  The actual shooting of the film was, as indicated above, straight forward. Welles and Robinson, though political allies, seem not to have hit it off particularly well; Robinson’s performance is solid and clear, but not vividly engaged, containing – for him – a rather high proportion of ‘ers’ and ‘ums’. The running business of his pipe, which breaks in the first scene and then reappears taped, is lumberingly done. For his part, Robinson found Welles (or at least the film) uninspiring. In his memoirs he writes: ‘Orson has genius but in this film it seems to have run out.’3 Loretta Young, that skittish young Catholic miss, simply found Welles fun, laughing so hard with him in the make-up van that the make-up artists had to get stern with her; she may have had something of a crush on him.

  Welles himself, to judge from a grumpy interview he gave to Hedda Hopper on the set, was not wholly engaged by the work in hand. ‘Tell me, Orson,’ she asked, vexingly, ‘what is it you really want to do?4 First it’s one thing, then another – radio, movies, painting, the stage, dabbling –’ ‘No,’ he barked, ‘not dabbling. I’m no dabbler. Sometimes I wish I were. Dabblers have all the fun. But I’m constitutionally unable to do anything but take my jobs seriously.’ Alexander Woollcott, he tells her, had asked him, ‘I wonder if you really want to go places in show business?’ Welles had replied, ‘I don’t think I do.’ ‘My real interest in life is in education,’ he told Hopper. ‘I want to be a teacher. All this experience I’ve been piling up is equipping me for that future … I shall know how to dramatise the Art of imparting knowledge.’ Welles told Barbara Leaming that he had approached the foundations and offered himself to spearhead an education drive. He had no takers. ‘And will you be leading the people to a way of thinking?’ continued Hedda Hopper, smelling a political rat. ‘No. The people can be trusted to do their own thinking … masses of people are never wrong. They’re always right. The public’s judgement on a play is always right, though the critics may be wrong. I shall try only to help people to the knowledge that will aid them in forming correct conclusions.’ Abandoning this slightly dubious line of thought, he speaks of Todd School, in which he says he has a personal and a financial interest. ‘One day I shall leave all this behind me, go back there, and give full rein to my ideas. That’s when life will really begin for me.’ It is an unlikely vision – Welles as a prep-school master – but a charming one. ‘Rita thinks my idea is swell.’ No doubt she would have done, had she believed it for a second – had she indeed had any recent conversation at all with Welles. Bringing the interview to an end, he puts his finger precisely on his problem. ‘The truth is, I’m a sweat guy. I hear that Noël Coward can write a play in a week. Not me. If I can write a play at all, or a radio script, or a scenario, a newspaper column or anything, it’s only by virtue of sweating it out. I will fight to the last drop of sweat – but believe me, I do everything the hard way.’ It was true enough. All the early work was achieved by audacity and adrenalin, sheer exuberance and delight in the work of his colleagues. Now, at the age of thirty, adrenalin was harder to command, and audacity not enough. The magic touch that had so sustained Welles in his twenties had disappeared: now it was just hard, hard work, and he was no longer sure that he enjoyed the job. But what to do instead? It is a question that many a performer has asked himself or herself when the honeymoon of their early career is over – can it really only be this, over and over again? Actors and directors are not, generally speaking, well qualified for any other job; most hit on their vocations precisely because they seemed no good for anything else. This is the moment at which character and power of endurance – what the Victorians used to call ‘bottom’ – becomes almost as important as talent, and much more important than luck.

  There was still politics, of course, but Welles appeared quite reconciled to never entering that arena full time. He couldn’t afford it, for a start. And he felt he had missed his moment; had he stood in 1944, he told Barbara Leaming, instead of ’45 or ’46, he might have been elected. He was discouraged from standing in California by his doughty research assistant Geneva Cranston, who told him that he’d never carry Los Angeles because of the communist opposition to him. How bewildered the FBI – still busily monitoring his every move – would have been to hear that. ‘There were a lot of card-carrying fellows,’ he told Learning, ‘never forget that – and I was very much not of their group.’ He contemplated standing in New York and then in his home state of Wisconsin, but the Republican candidate had the support of the dairy workers, so Welles did not bother to challenge him. The man’s name was Joseph McCarthy. ‘And that’s how there was a McCarthy. That’s a terrible thing to have on your conscience.’

  Welles was, in fact, somewhat depressed politically. Truman had been a bitter disappointment to him, both as a man and in terms of what he stood for. He was loyal at first. Shortly after Truman succeeded Roosevelt, Welles had written a column in which he said, ‘Our new President has taken over the biggest job there ever was in the world.5 For our sake, let’s make it a little easier for him than we did for the great man who died for us last week.’ This moratorium did not last long. While shooting The Stranger, he wrote a column (one of his last) in which he described a nationwide presidential broadcast: everyone on the set stopped filming to listen. No one was impressed, Welles says, and they were from all points on the political compass. One of the grips was called ‘Missouri’ because – like Truman – he came from there: ‘He says he’s the only registered Democrat from his state who hasn’t got a job in Washington. This is, of course, bitter and unfair … maybe Roosevelt’s heir is as good a man as he looked for a while there. A lot of good Americans who voted for him are saying they’ve got to be shown.’

  The very particular political melancholy that is engendered by disappointment in the leader of the party you support had descended on Welles. A subsequent New York Post column, also written during the shoot of The Stranger, describes lessons he is taking to learn to drive, but his intention is not purely anecdotal. He reveals an unexpected longing for some kind of meaning to life. He has been for a drive with ‘some daredevil instructor’ who gave him his licence, ‘laughing heartily as he filled it out. He must have thought I was kidding, or else the man was floundering in hysteria … all I know is that it’s now perfectly legal for me to drive. I only wish I could.’6 (This is no columnist’s invention: Welles was wholly ignorant of the art of driving a car, but was nonetheless so impatient behind the wheel that the smallest journey was a threat to pedestrians, passengers, fellow-drivers and above all himself. Shifra Haran recollected that he was so eager to arrive that he would quite unconsciously put his foot over hers on the accelerator when she was driving.) After he received his licence, he continues, the car broke down. ‘I did whatever it is I do to a car to make it stall.’ He didn’t know where he was, then spotted the spire of the set for The Stranger. He asked a passing child if the church belonged to the movies, but she didn’t know. ‘I figure that the child and I, and maybe you, need something we can rely on,’ he ends on an unaccustomed note. ‘Something that won’t be torn down to make room for a new movie, but it had better be something as good as churches have been when they were good.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Full, Complete and Unrestricted Authority

  THE TRUTH IS that Welles’s mind was already turned away from Hollywood, even before he had completed shooting The Stranger. He had determined on a return, in the grandest possible style, to the stage: the old standby. It was like a parental home to him, where he could always be sure of a welcome. And if he was returning to the theatre, let it be to the theatre theatrical – that, it seems, was his thinking when he decided to do a version of the much-adapted Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days. He himself had already adapted it twice, once on radio and once as a screenplay for George Schaefer in 1941, when they were still thrashing around for a film with which to follow Citizen Kane. The novel had the advantage, apart from anything else, of being out of copyright; moreover, the two previous f
ilm versions had been as long ago as 1914 and 1916, so he would be in a good position to transfer his efforts (if successful) to the screen.

  The new stage show would be a love-letter to the almost forgotten genre of Musical Extravaganza, a form of theatre of which Welles can have had only the most slender personal experience. Perhaps in Chicago in the early nineteen-twenties there may have been some residual traces of it, but essentially it was a species of entertainment that had died out by the end of the First World War, due to its extraordinary demands in terms of backstage crew, of which large armies were required, and whole acres of painted scenery, which were heavily dependent on intensive skilled labour. In theory, it was a form of theatre that should have been anathema to Welles the Expressionist and Welles the master of agit-prop. But the theatre of Orson Welles was a broad church. A not insignificant side of him longed, as we have so often seen, for sheer escapism in the theatre, not of the romantic variety, but of the thrills and spills, gasps and ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ kind: he required his timbers to be shivered, his withers to be wrung, his heart to be lodged more or less permanently in his mouth: he wanted, in short, to become a child again. ‘If astonishment and delight won’t bring an audience into a playhouse any more,’ he had written in his introduction to Bruce Elliot’s Magic, ‘then of course something is rotten in the state of the Union, and it isn’t only magic that is doomed.’ The genre of extravaganza embraced many theatrical delights: vaudevillian comedy, romantic interest, lovely leggy girls, spectacle, livestock, costumes, scenery, special effects. He would have it all, and more.

  So to make it happen, in August of 1945 – just before the commencement of principal photography for The Stranger – he formed a partnership with a properly old-style impresario, Mike Todd (born Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen), then only in his mid-thirties, but already a byword for flamboyance and reckless enterprise, fresh from his triumphs with Hot Mikado (Gilbert and Sullivan jazzed), Cole Porter’s Something for the Boys and Mexican Hayride. Todd enlisted the composer of the last-named only modestly successful musical to provide songs and incidental music for Around the World and, after agreeing to pay Welles $2,500 a week to write the show during the first few months of 1946, with a view to putting it on in the autumn of that year, left the co-authors to block out the plan for the script and music. His contract with Welles gave the author-director – there was no plan for him to appear in the show – ‘full, complete and unrestricted authority’; there had never been a contract like it since his first contract with RKO. Porter, at a rather low point both in his career and his life, was cheerfully stimulated, excited to be associating himself with ‘the crazy and unusual production of the theatre – the kind of thing one dreams about but never quite dares to attempt … it’s because I’m bored.1 I want to do something “different”.’ He saw Around the World as ‘a drama with music, too’, though as the programme note for the show pointed out, there is more music in Around the World than in most musicals. As well as a set of four songs, Porter had provided music for the filmed sequences, the chase, the circus, the magic show and other non-song sequences. After the initial meetings, Welles plunged into shooting The Stranger, taking occasional trips to New York to continue his work with Porter.

  At the same time – a sure sign that his adrenalin was beginning to flow again, bringing with it a renewal of his former intemperate appetite for work – Welles was becoming intrigued by the prospect of directing a play by the exiled German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, whom he had met in Los Angeles, where Brecht was part of the expatriate circle centred on Berthold and Saskia Viertel’s salon in Santa Monica. It was there that Charles Laughton had met the playwright; they had taken a remarkable shine to each other, finding common ground in their love of Japanese art and a sense of the social purpose of the theatre – Brecht from a thoroughgoing Marxist perspective, Laughton from a passionate faith in the power of art to change people and, as he said to an approving Brecht, a conviction that ‘I know what people are like, and I want to show them’. Welles and Laughton were acquainted too, and had circled round each other admiringly but suspiciously for some time. Laughton had been at the Los Angeles premiere of Citizen Kane, and had twice appeared as the guest on The Orson Welles Almanac; both had hurled themselves into wartime fund-raising activities on the radio and on countless platforms. But where Welles was politically fearless and highly public, Laughton was furtive and private, partly because he was terrified of being exposed as a homosexual, but also out of a deep instinct to protect his inner life. As artists, they were polar opposites, Welles functioning on adrenalin and great sweeping gestures, Laughton toiling away on his inner processes before gradually committing himself to the heroically ambitious performances for which he was widely admired as one of the greatest living actors – if not, perhaps, the greatest of them all. But just as Welles had passed through a period in the wilderness, artistically speaking, so Laughton had suffered a recent decline in his reputation as an actor since the sensational climax of his Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame some seven years earlier. After a run of undistinguished films, he was now universally referred to –. sometimes approvingly, sometimes not – as ‘a ham’. His slowly deepening relationship with Brecht had restored his joy in acting and his self-respect; they had been working together for some years on an English version of Brecht’s work-in-progress, The Life of Galileo, a fruit of his exile. The play had already been done in Zurich, but Brecht was still developing what he wanted to say about the founder of modern physics and his vexed relationship with the Church of Rome. The unique praxis evolved by actor and author working together on the play, a method celebrated by Brecht in some beautifully personal poems, was all the more extraordinary in that they had no common language: Laughton spoke no German, and Brecht could barely understand English. Nonetheless, Brecht felt able to judge the merits of the translation that Laughton, working from a literal version of the text, was offering him, and together, by some osmotical-dialectical process, they arrived at a play that satisfied them both.

  The Augsburger Brecht and the Yorkshireman Laughton were both shrewd and deep-thinking men, so when they decided to ask Orson Welles to direct Galileo, it was not done lightly. In December of 1945, Brecht noted in his diary that Laughton had read the play to Welles: ‘His attitude is pleasant;2 his remarks intelligent.’ Laughton – who had checked out various possible directors, including, unimaginably, that epitome of Broadway elegance Alfred Lunt – wanted a sounding board for his acting, feeling, as he said, that the nearer he got to rehearsals ‘the more scared I become of being directed by anyone but an actor’.3 Welles immediately knew that he was being offered something remarkable, quite unlike anything else he had ever done: the play, suffused with Brecht’s premonitory anxieties about the development of nuclear weaponry, which Welles urgently shared, and dealing profoundly with the question – so pertinent to Welles’s own experience – of the radical’s relationship with society, instantly inflamed his imagination. He started to think of staging solutions that would serve the play’s revolutionary nature.

  Barbara Leaming claims that Welles had absorbed Brecht’s theories, and that they profoundly influenced all of his subsequent work. There seems to be little evidence for this, though he was what might be called a spontaneous Brechtian. The famous and much-misunderstood Verfremdungseffekt was second nature to Welles: he too wanted to make the audience assess what they saw on stage in a critical spirit, rather than encouraging them to empathise with the characters; his work, too, was designed to appeal to the brain rather than the heart. And he shared Brecht’s faith in The People. Equally passionately, he longed to break the mould theatrically, and Galileo was clearly the play with which to do it, demanding the kind of anti-theatrical theatricality he had stumbled on when he was forced to stage Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock without decor, lights or a normal theatrical environment. ‘Dear Charlie,’4 he wrote to Laughton, ‘I’m much encouraged to note from your thoughts about scaffolding etc that we’re thinking a
long identical lines. My God how I wish there were some kind of brand new place for us to play our play in!! … lacking it, of course, we’ll have to work a little magic and somehow make the Shubert rat-traps seem new … with something that makes it clear we’re only pitching our tents.’ He was reaching out for something new in his own work. But though he loved the play, Welles was by no means overawed by the playwright. ‘Brecht was very very tiresome today,’ he told Laughton, ‘until (I’m sorry to say) I was stern and a trifle shitty. I hate working like that.’ Welles was unaccustomed to dealing with living authors in the theatre, especially ones who happened to be superb directors themselves. Nor was he prepared to succumb to the alternation of ruthless high-handedness and manipulative charm by which Brecht enslaved his collaborators, and he was determined to make that clear from the beginning. He was more than capable of matching Brecht’s ruthlessness, going straight for the jugular. ‘I said to him one day,5 while we were talking about Galileo,’ Welles told Peter Bogdanovich, ‘that he had written a perfect anti-Communist work [and] he almost became aggressive. I said, “But this church you describe has to be Stalin and not the Pope. You have made something resolutely anti-Communist.”’ Welles relished this sort of intellectual rough-house, and suspected that Brecht did too. ‘Brecht had an extraordinary brain. You could tell he’d been educated by the Jesuits – he had the kind of disciplined brain characterised by Jesuit education. Instinctively, he was more of an anarchist than a Marxist, but he believed himself a perfect Marxist.’ Welles dealt equally breezily with that other product of a Jesuit education, Charles Laughton: ‘So you find my confidence in my own charm overbearing,6 do you?’ he wrote to Laughton. ‘Then go fuck yourself! Love Orson’ – leaving Laughton, no doubt, blinking and speechless, though perhaps just slightly exhilarated, too.