by Simon Callow
F: preparations for his September night-club debut at the Copacabana for which he’ll have to write himself out of the early scenes of Around the World, run to the. Adelphi then hustle back to the Copa for his two late shows; G: plan to do King Lear matinées when Around the World isn’t playing; H: plan to revive Five Kings. His week actually starts Friday night after the half-hour broadcast. As soon as this is over, he chooses the script for the next week, begins trimming it in time and casting for the finished script. He works on things through Saturday morning. His dressing room off-time is spent Saturday afternoon and evenings dictating the script for his Sunday radio lecture.
The previous week he had recorded Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince with Bing Crosby. But his more visionary activities were not ignored, either. ‘The other day he accepted a directorship with a new theatre arts foundation which is going to do everything from educating actors to getting them jobs. He has no further plans at the moment, he says. “I’m just sort of dawdling.”’ Of course Welles encouraged the image. But it was more than just self-promotion; he hardly felt alive unless he was operating on every imaginable front. At some point during the run his current secretary, Jackson Leighter’s sister Lolita Herbert (who had taken to distilling his letters into a question requiring a Yes/No choice at the bottom of the page), sent him an itemised memo with running commentary; among the items are:
4): am enclosing a letter from S. Eisenstein of Moscow …29
6): am enclosing a letter from a typical Welles fan in England to whom I have sent your photograph. You are deeply loved & admired there and I have yet to find a letter from the British Isles that is filled with anything but the highest praise for you personally & for your varied activities … 11): as a result of the wonderful plug you gave the new matchmaking course at Birmingham Hospital a couple of weeks ago on the Pabst show, I was asked to visit the various depts the other day.
*
Amidst so much activity, there was one notable absence: Galileo. In early May, while he was still on the road with Around the World, Welles had had Sunday lunch with Brecht; Ferdinand Reyher, Brecht’s close collaborator, had recorded in his diary: ‘Welles now ready to direct Galileo.’ But in the interim, while Welles was wrestling with his behemothian extravaganza, Laughton and Brecht – mere amateurs at theatrical production – had begun to worry about finance. Eventually they decided to approach Mike Todd (the same Mike Todd with whom Welles had just fallen out to such disastrous effect on his personal finances), and Todd had enthusiastically agreed to produce the show. He was not, after all, averse to a bit of culture, having just successfully revived Major Maurice Evans’s Hamlet – the G.I. Hamlet (Todd’s title, needless to say) – at the City Center, to Welles’s great chagrin, the dapper, dry, polished Evans being everything that he loathed in an actor. Todd’s accession to the producing team of Galileo was casually announced to Dick Wilson towards the end of June at a meeting with Bert Allenberg, part of Laughton’s agency, Berg-Allenberg; Welles and Wilson immediately withdrew from the project. The timing was poor: Around the World was desperately struggling to cover its costs, precisely because, as Dick Wilson insisted in a letter to Laughton, they had opened it in the spring instead of the autumn, to allow Laughton to fulfil his filming schedule. If they had waited, Around the World ‘would have been a big and substantial hit’.30 He continues: ‘We don’t like to put the blame on anyone for what apparently is happening, but we can’t escape the conclusion that we’ve been treated very badly.’ Brecht, meanwhile, having heard rumours in Los Angeles that Welles was unavailable, had sent Mercury Productions a telegram asking if the Galileo team could quote their enthusiastic endorsement of the play to other directors. Smarting from these two slaps in the face, Wilson wrote a somewhat rash letter of reproach to Laughton, informing him that:
directing Galileo is only half of what Orson can do or intended to do with the play.31 The idea of the production, the contribution to the work of scenic and costume designers, the casting values – all these count as fully as the direction. When Orson does a play … he really does it. Not a detail of the production-in-plan escaped him. That’s the only way he can function right. The productions show it. As a result, he has no equal in the theatre. On a play like Galileo, with a great actor like yourself, and with a great author, direction is only a job, and one which might so easily be at odds with the production.
It is quite impossible, he says, for Mercury to work with Todd, whose words and actions since their falling out ‘are certainly not conducive to another affiliation’. He ends by expressing how disappointed he is ‘to lose the opportunity to do (and be associated with you in) one of the greatest productions of the contemporary theatre’.
One way and another it is a very provocative letter, though it is quite clear that Laughton and Brecht were in the wrong in the matter of Todd. It is also clear that they were worried, not unreasonably, that Mercury would not be able to hold up financially under the impact of the widely perceived disaster of Around the World, and that they could help by securing some sort of underpinning. Wilson’s frustration that ‘the terms offered to Todd were basically ones that were refused to us’ is wholly understandable. It is, however, a little hard to know exactly what he is getting at in his paragraph about Welles the director – that he’s worth the money and the trouble; that he will do it better than anyone else could; or that they should just let him get on with it. Whatever the case, it seems a little bizarre that Wilson should be writing to these two world-class hommes du théâtre as if they had never done a show before. Laughton replied not to Wilson, but to Welles himself – ‘I do not appreciate your habit of using a third party to do the calling’32 – in a letter of which the draft is clearly much rewritten in anger, full of false starts and rubbings-out. His rage and frustration are palpable. ‘I will answer two points only. First, my contract with Todd is not at all the same as yours. All the points I protested are eliminated. Second, I might have called you and told you immediately when Brecht and I had decided on Todd, if we could get him. I just plain was not going to put up with the inevitable procrastination. Either the play was going on the earliest possible day or I had to do some movies. Time at my age is dear.’ (He was forty-seven.) Unsurprisingly, he picks up on Wilson’s odd panegyric on the scope of Welles’s directing activities. ‘The rest of Dick’s letter seems to me to be nonsense, including a passage which says “When Orson does a play … he really does it.” I was under the impression that we were all three to collaborate on “the idea of the production” and so on (now it would be four of course) for this new and difficult play – otherwise how could I also “function right”. You are an extraordinary man of the theatre and therefore I flatly do not believe that you cannot function as a member of a team.’
Here Laughton had completely misjudged his man. Welles was not interested in the sort of collaboration that Laughton and Brecht had in mind, a kind of triumvirate – or, horror of horrors, quadrumvirate with Todd. Welles simply did not understand the idea of democracy in the theatre, or this sort of creative pool. Laughton and Brecht had blurred the lines between author and actor, and now they wanted to blur the lines between director, actor and author. That would not suit Welles. He led; that was it. ‘You are the best man in the world,’ Laughton continued, ‘to put the Church of Rome on the stage, to mention only one aspect of the play. This appears to me to matter. Cannot this unimportant thing between you and Todd be worked out. Todd has never spoken ill of you to either of us. The strongest word he has used is “afraid”. That also is nonsense when there is this play to be told. Brecht greets you. Charles.’ Laughton puts the whole matter in perspective with his fine phrase ‘there is this play to be told’, a phrase of which Brecht would certainly have approved. The telling of the play was Laughton’s whole ambition, to which everything else was subservient. To Welles it may have seemed exciting, fun, a challenge, ‘one of the greatest productions of the contemporary theatre’ – in other words, more glory; but to Laughton it w
as a way forward for the future – the future of the theatre, but equally, perhaps, the future of mankind. ‘It seems that Brecht is our man and is launching the theatre back to us on the old Elizabethan terms,’33 he had written to Alfred Lunt. ‘This is a new play, and it is of such stature! It is as important as, if not more important than, reviving the classics.’
Welles replied to Laughton’s passionate letter with some dignity, but without making any concessions. He was prepared to let the play go rather than deal with Mike Todd. He reviews the history of the venture, starting with Todd’s withdrawal from Around the World after finding himself to be ‘fresh out of dough’: ‘Believe me, Charlie, we had no desire to produce this dam costly behemoth of a spectacle.’ He describes their negotiations with Brecht and Laughton, holding out for a decent deal, then proposing to forgo any stake in the show. ‘According to our understanding, we were to start rehearsals about a week from now in Los Angeles. Nothing short of the news of your deal with Todd would have kept us from fulfilling this commitment.’ It is hard to accept this argument, since Around the World was still running at the Adelphi, and there was no talk of the show closing. Welles challenges Laughton’s claim that he needs to make a movie – he’s had five months since they agreed to do Galileo in August. As for Dick Wilson’s phrase about Orson really doing a play, ‘he was just trying to reassure you that once I start in on the actual job of rehearsal it would be the hard work of dedication, with no other concerns or projects to interfere’. He thanks Laughton for ‘thinking I’m “the best man in the world to put the Church of Rome on the stage”. I think I’m the best man in the world to put Galileo on the stage. My love for it as a director, if not as intimate, is quite as warm as yours: the actor-author’s. This is my particular equipment for the work and I terribly regret that this equipment can’t be put humbly and industriously – as it would have been – to the service of a noble and important theatre work.’ He says that Todd’s abandonment of Around the World, plus giving Galileo the good autumn slot:
has combined to cost me more money than I’ll be able to make for quite some time. This is absolutely no concern of yours, but it does have its little place in the crushing weight of my disappointment. You say Todd ‘has never spoken ill’ of me. And I’m thankful to learn that the ‘strongest word he has used is afraid’. Well, it’s sure Todd has nothing to fear from me now. I’ll never cost him a cent. And if he manages to get together enough money for the play, I fervently hope he’ll never cost you an hour of unhappiness. I don’t honestly think he will. He can be generous, and is utterly incapable of pretentiousness. You don’t, of course expect him to inspire you, but I do believe you’ll find him stimulating. He is touched with that particular grandeur which belongs to all the best circus showmen. You will enjoy this, for he has plenty of accompanying charm; and you will know how to translate it into terms useful to Broadway success.
He ends on a note of genuine personal disappointment. ‘He could take nothing from Galileo but me. This, for whatever it matters, he most assuredly has done. I’m the best man to stage the play, but I’m far – very far – from indispensable. I cannot but acknowledge that I need Galileo far more than Galileo needs me. For my last word, take my oath that while I look forward to its production with all the bitter jealousy a thwarted producer can suffer, it is also with the highest hopes a most admiring friend can enjoy’
Game, set and match to Welles in the epistolary tournament. His restrained irony and eloquence and dignity make the other two look rather shabby, his generosity both sincere and nobly expressed. But he ended up not directing Galileo, so he was in fact the loser. It is impossible to calculate how his life might have changed had he created for the play the sort of astonishing production that – as he and Dick Wilson both said – he was peculiarly equipped to do, especially if it had had at its centre a great performance by Laughton. Brecht’s American reputation, too, might have been transformed, as might Laughton’s somewhat faltering standing as an actor. In contemplating what might have been, however, one has to wonder about the degree to which Welles would have been able or willing to deal successfully with either Laughton or Brecht, with their very particular and very different demands, however ‘shitty’ he might have forced himself to be. Laughton’s attitude to Welles was always uneasy. Powerful, rich and famous though he might have become, his cautiousness, intellectual inferiority complex and slow-moving cussedness remained intact. He was daunted and a little panicked by the whirlwind that was Welles. What position could Laughton adopt in relation to him? He could be neither teacher nor pupil, his preferred relationships. Welles would simply make him feel dull and old, leaving him blinking foolishly as Welles performed his verbal, artistic and actual conjuring tricks, not knowing quite how he did it but vaguely suspecting a fraud somewhere. Moreover, Laughton demanded patience and empathy from a director, qualities of which Welles had rather short supplies. Welles had never directed a major actor, with all the profound sense of self-protection proper to them; and Laughton was not only profound, but fathomlessly subtle. In sharp contrast to Welles, adrenalin was the least of the elements of his work process; small wonder that when he came to direct his own first film, The Night of the Hunter, he had as happy an experience with the meditative, art-loving cinematographer Stanley Cortez as Welles had had a miserable and frustrating one. Laughton’s stubbornness would no doubt have set in at an early stage, and he was not easily to be railroaded; more than one distinguished director in his past had been reduced to impotent despair.
As for Brecht, he was to be messed with at one’s peril, although the two men did have something in common: a relaxed attitude to authorship. Both understood the word in the spirit of a Renaissance painter’s workshop: the name on the title page represented the joint labours of a team of contributors under the general guidance of the designated author. Whether Welles would have allowed the boot to be on the other foot for once, and would have been happy to have subsumed his contributions under Brecht’s name, is an interesting question. Certainly Brecht would have tolerated no co-credit. In conversations with Barbara Leaming and Peter Bogdanovich, Welles describes Chaplin and Olivier, two of the biggest beasts in the jungle (and with both of whom he had damaging encounters from which he emerged the loser), as possessing at their core a kind of peasant cunning; and to some extent, and in different ways, both Laughton and Brecht had this quality: it was the thing that had brought them together and kept them together – a certain caution, a shrewdness, a cogitating tenacity. Welles entirely lacked this quality, preferring to throw himself at a problem – to throw his resources at it – personal, financial, energetic. He rarely emerged the winner in his dealings with skilful operators, especially those who played a long game.
In the event, after much toing and froing, during which both Elia Kazan and Harold Clurman were considered and dismissed as potential directors, Joseph Losey was given the job on the clear understanding that he was very much the lesser of the triumvirate – triumvirate because Todd, too, had fallen out with Brecht and Laughton when they refused to countenance his notion of hiring the furniture and costumes from MGM. It was another year before the play reached the stage, and when it did, it was at the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles, and the producer – to Welles’s infinite vexation – was his old adversary and former colleague, John Houseman, whose path he seemed inevitably to cross. The play was a succès d’estime, albeit of a rather sober kind, which left its audiences thoughtful rather than excited – not at all the sort of experience Brecht must have had in mind when he decided that the director of Around the World was the ideal man to stage his play.
That monstrously money-consuming spectacle was now coming to the end of its rackety life. The notice to close went up on 27 July. DEAR ORSON, Cole Porter, who was present at neither the first nor the last night of the show, wired Welles a couple of days later: YOUR TRAGIC NEWS ARRIVED THIS MORNING STOP ALL MY SYMPATHY GOES OUT TO YOU FOR HAVING MADE MORE THAN HUMAN EFFORTS TO KEEP OUR POOR LITTLE SHOW RUNNIN
G SO LONG YOUR DEVOTED COLE.34 For him there were no hard feelings, only pleasant memories; unlike Welles, Porter had lost little in the venture, and – perhaps reinvigorated by his exhilarating contact with the young master at his most exuberant – shortly afterwards started work on the show generally considered to be his masterpiece, Kiss Me, Kate. For Welles, of course, Around the World had been nothing less than a financial catastrophe, causing him to mortgage his future, at the same time creating tax problems for himself that would not be resolved for many years, and then only partially. The running costs were a staggering $27,000 a week: the best weekly figure – and there were few other weeks as good – had been $ 24,000. The show finally closed on 3 August, having lasted, as maliciously predicted by Irving Cahn, quite a few days less than Phileas Fogg’s little trip. Welles was left with nothing to show for it but the 10,000 specially printed souvenir programme books, a mere handful of which had been sold; the publisher gave them to him for nothing, and later that year he sent them out as Christmas cards.
Over the next few months there were desperate attempts to take the show elsewhere: enlisting first Alexander Korda (with whom Welles was currently trying to set up a number of films), then the great showman Charles B. Cochran – who had so ardently desired to transfer the Mercury Julius Caesar to the Royal Albert Hall,35 no less – but he was unable to convince them that London, or indeed Australia, would take to the show that Broadway had so expensively rejected. Dick Wilson wired Cochran with the suggestion that Around the World might be suitable for the pantomime season, offering him costumes and scenery valued at $130,000 (which would cost $10,000 to transport) and Welles, who could stay in the show till 15 January. Cochran replied: REGRET IMPOSSIBLE SECURE ANY LONDON THEATRE FOR AROUND THE WORLD AT CHRISTMAS. FURTHERMORE, he added, a little tartly, CANNOT AROUSE ANY INTEREST IN PROPOSITION WHICH HAS ALREADY BEEN OFFERED FOR SOME TIME BY KORDA. That same Korda – who shared Welles’s belief that if you said a thing often enough it was bound to happen – had been making some rather large promises: ‘I thought,’36 Dick Wilson wrote plaintively to Korda’s number two at London Films, ‘he said he would have the necessary permits and have the theatre lined up in a couple of days.’ Through Korda, Welles had attempted to meet Rex Harrison, with a view to inveigling him into playing Fogg; but it all came to naught.