by Simon Callow
Chief Lynwood Shull (as opposed to Shaw or Shawl) had indeed been found, and admitted to having struck Woodard with his black jack when he became unruly, taking the stick from him. ‘I grabbed it away from him and cracked him across the head. It may have hit his eyes.’22 Thus vindicated, the NAACP took the case to the Department of Justice, which – purely because it was an election year, in the view of the judge who finally tried the case – finally intervened, filing federal charges. Oliver Harrington had no doubt about Welles’s influence on this outcome: YOUR TRULY GREAT COMMENTARIES IN BEHALF OF ISAAC WOODARD ARE RESPONSIBLE MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE FOR THE APPREHENSION OF THE POLICE TORTURER IN BATESBURG COUNTLESS THOUSANDS OF AMERICANS ARE BETTER HUMAN BEINGS FROM HEARING YOUR BROADCASTS AGAINST FASCIST SADISM NOW SWEEPING A LARGE SECTION OF OUR COUNTRY.23 Samuel Procter, a black man who fought in the Second World War, wrote: ‘The crying need of the minorities, particularly the coloured man, is a spokesman. I believe you can fill that job, even though it means being a martyr … I hope you will accept the enclosed check to help defray expenses involved in making America conscious of its duty and its opportunity’24 – a phrase that must have moved Welles, because that is exactly what he hoped and believed he was doing. Someone else wrote to say that he had fought in the war, but ‘it seems that I was fighting in the wrong place’,25 a common reaction. A nameless fan was even more enthusiastic: ‘Thousands of years ago/ God gave to the world Moses – the great teacher/ Then Jesus the Saviour/ Then Abraham Lincoln the Emancipator/ Then Franklin Delano Roosevelt the great Humanitarian/ and Now Orson Welles – the most wonderful fighter for the rights and freedom of all mankind.’26
Aiken felt a little differently. ‘Please don’t come to Georgia,’27 said one sinister little note, ‘we don’t think it would be very healthy for you down this way.’ The Republican county chairman John Willingham had issued a ghoulish invitation – COME OVER HERE SOMETIME WE ARE ANXIOUS TO ENTERTAIN YOU – followed by a more explicit threat of a libel suit: YOU MUST REALISE THAT AN IRRESPONSIBLE PERSON OF YOUR CHARACTER CANNOT MERELY HAVE ACCESS TO THE WAVE FREQUENCIES AND DEFAME A WHOLE COMMUNITY WITHOUT PROVOCATION.28 No doubt it was this that put the wind up Adrian Samish, vice-president of ABC, and his colleagues: OUR NEWS DEPARTMENT HAS BROUGHT TO MY ATTENTION,29 he wired Welles, THE PROBLEMS THEY HAVE BEEN HAVING LATELY ABOUT TRYING TO GET YOU TO WRITE A SCRIPT AND TRYING TO GET YOU TO SUBMIT IT IN SUFFICIENT TIME FOR THEIR REGULAR REVIEW OF ALL COMMENTATORS FOR LIBEL, GOOD TASTE AND APPROPRIATE NEWS AUTHORITY. His script, Samish continued, must be submitted at least two hours before broadcast time. Welles will not be permitted to ad lib; if he persists, they will be forced to cut him off the air, explaining that he is broadcasting material he has refused to submit to ABC. WE ARE HAPPY TO GIVE YOU THE OPPORTUNITY OF UTILISING YOUR GREAT TALENT BUT UNDER THE FCC LAW THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF BROADCASTS ARE ABC’S I AM SURE YOU WILL UNDERSTAND OUR POSITION AND I AM TELLING OUR NEWS DEPARTMENT THAT I PERSONALLY KNOW YOU WILL CO-OPERATE. And he added, a little desperately, PLEASE DON’T LET ME DOWN. It was scarcely to be imagined that Welles would be allowed to get away with it for much longer.
Ignoring Samish and with only the merest nod in the direction of Aiken’s offended civic pride, he returned to the fray the following week. ‘The place was Batesburg,’30 he says firmly, then recapitulates what happened the week before in Aiken: the banning of the movie, the stripping down and burning of the posters, the hanging in effigy. ‘They’ve even threatened to sue me for $2m for goodness’ sake.’ He reviews the case in the light of the new evidence, describing how Woodard was witnessed in the street by a minister and a workman, having his face washed over and over again by a policeman, who asked him repeatedly: ‘Can you see yet?’ Everything, he says, points to chief of police Shull. ‘Mr Shull is not going to forget me. I will haunt him.’ Then he quotes the letter from his Former Fan who claims that Woodard was blinded by another Negro. ‘It seems the Yankees always have to pick on someone about something, especially from the South.’ Southerners respect blacks, he says, it’s just that the two races shouldn’t live together. Welles is trying to engineer some kind of mulatto nation, an abomination to the gallant men and women of the South who have ‘certain well-founded beliefs’. Welles wants to give the Negro a better chance than they would the white man. ‘Dear Former Fan,’ replies Welles, ‘Batesburg is not a battle in the civil war.’ He eloquently rebuffs is ex-fan’s specious arguments, mocking the suggestion that Woodard wanted to spawn a mulatto nation: ‘he went to see a woman of his own race bearing his own name, but he never did see her. He’ll never see her. Even Chief Shull, he says, doesn’t pretend that he was preventing Woodard from marrying his sister.’ Welles sums up his own contribution to the story, returning to his Shadow mode:
When I stumbled upon this story several weeks ago … the name of the guilty policeman was unknown and it looked as though it always would be. I promised to get that name. I have it now … we won’t let him go. I promised I’d hunt him down. I have. I gave my word I’d see him unmasked. I have unmasked him. I’m going to haunt Police Chief Shull for the rest of his natural life. Mr Shull is not going to forget me. And what’s more important, I’m not going to let you forget Mr Shull. Well, that’s enough of that for now. We’ll come back to Mr Shull next week. And the week after that. And the week after that.
He moves on to a retelling of the story of the Unknown Soldier, one he had already written up for Free World, to which he brings exactly the same degree of emotion as he brought to Woodard’s story. ‘The people want world government,’ he cries, ‘standing side by side, when the tools of war are put down forever.’
There is no contradiction in this, no insincerity: but in the end it is rather like being at Hyde Park Corner, with Welles, the radical gun for hire, on his soapbox, ready to sound off on the good causes of the week. In fact, he didn’t return to Woodard, or Chief Shull, until the penultimate Commentary some weeks later; after which Samish, true to his word, cut him off the air, selling his space instead to Chimney Sweep, the latest in a long line of ignominious substitutions that had started with Tarzan at RKO. Samish offered him a lifeline: if Welles was interested in doing a Commentary that completely ignored politics, Samish believed he had ‘a commercial spot where he can be sold’.31 It was not a proposition Welles cared to entertain. Significantly, just before Samish made his new offer, Dick Wilson had asked ABC whether they might like to use Welles as roving reporter from Europe: Welles was of course planning a number of films in London with Korda, but there is a sense that his patience with America was running out. In that penultimate Commentary, he says, wryly, ‘I’m being sued for $2 million, and I’ve been burned and hanged in effigy because of the things I’ve said on this program. I’d like to thank ABC for giving me the chance to say those things … and I’d like to say that if I ever got the chance to say those things again … I’ll say them again.’32 Then, with justified pride, he quotes the telegram Oliver Harrington had sent him, informing him that Lynwood Shull had been made the target of a criminal information charge by the Department of Justice for violating the Civil Rights Statute, a seldom-used statute passed by Congress in 1870 giving civil rights to black people: ACTION OF JUSTICE DEPT IS HISTORIC MOVE PROFOUND IMPLICATIONS I PERSONALLY FEEL YOU MORE THAN ANY OTHER RESPONSIBLE PLEASE ACCEPT DEEP GRATITUDE OF THE NAACPS 700,000 MEMBERS.33
In a letter to radical Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, Welles said that he had had thousands of letters, almost all of which were commendatory, and hundreds of requests for the script. ‘You will all be disappointed to know,’34 he said, alluding to the 1870 statute, ‘that the penalty is only one year and the fine an extremely nominal one … Attorney General Clark has stated that he will ask for an amplification of the penalties … we must hold him to it … and use the publicity generated by this case to guarantee other minorities’ rights.’ It was the single most effective political action of his life, though not in its immediate outcome, because, as the trial judge J. Waties Waring feared, T
ruman and his Attorney General – ‘alarmed at the increased racial feeling in the country’35 – were more interested in being seen to have done something about the situation than in actually doing it. Waring was none too impressed by Welles’s involvement, either, directing the jury not to be influenced by ‘publicity seekers on the radio agitating for the prosecution of this case, or by politicians, mindful of the ballot box’. To his wife he wrote, ‘I do not believe that this poor blinded creature should be a football in the contest between box office and ballot box.’ The prosecution case was at best half-hearted, crucial witnesses were not called, defence witnesses were indulged, and despite Waring’s instruction to the jury that they were trying ‘only one white police officer, not the South’s racial customs’, the defence attorney declared: ‘If delivering a verdict against the federal government means that South Carolina will have to secede again, then let’s secede.’ The judge had to force the jury to discuss their verdict for at least twenty minutes. The instant they re-entered the courtroom, they returned a ‘not guilty’ verdict. Chief of police Lynwood Lanier Shull resumed his job, ending his days, covered in respect and affection, in a retirement home in Batesburg, South Carolina.
The event nevertheless had a considerable long-term effect. Among other things, it politicised Judge Waring, who became a close associate of the NAACP; he lived to be the first judge of modern times formally to declare segregated schooling unequal. The path to racial integration, the bare minimum for civilised inter-racial relations, was a long and stony one, and one that has perhaps not ended, but the Woodard case was a valuable step along it. His testimony illustrated as vividly as anything could have done that the issue was, above all, one of the right to respect. The whole incident had begun in the bus when the driver had cursed him for making him stop so that Woodard could use the toilet. ‘Talk to me like I’m talking to you,’ the mild Woodard had said. ‘I’m a man just like you.’ It was for this outrage that the driver reported him to the police. And when he got off the bus at Batesburg to meet ‘someone I want you to see’, and Shull had hit him on the head with his blackjack, Woodard answered the question as to whether he’d been discharged from the army with the single word ‘Yes’. ‘Don’t say yes to me,’ Shull had said, ‘say yes sir.’ And then, enraged by Woodard’s impertinence, he laid about him again with renewed vigour.
Welles did not often speak of his involvement in the case, but some years later, in London in 1955, he recounted the story on his television programme Orson Welles’s Sketch Book. And having recounted it, he observed:
We’re told that we should co-operate with the authorities.36 I’m not an anarchist. I don’t want to overthrow the rule of law, on the contrary, I want to bring the policeman to law. Obviously individual effort won’t do any good. There’s nothing an individual can do about protecting the individual in society. I’d like it very much if somebody would make a great big international organisation for the protection of the individual. It would be very nice to have that sort of an organisation, be nice to have that sort of card. I see the card as fitting into the passport, a little larger than the passport, with a border around it in bright colours, so that it would catch the eyes of the police. And they’d know who they were dealing with … and it might read something as follows. ‘This is to certify that the bearer is a member of the human race.’
This mellow and rueful tone was not available to Welles in the forties. Too much was still at stake.
His last Commentary for ABC was on 1 September; a few days before saw the beginning of a campaign to keep him on the air. The Hollywood Independent Citizens’ Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, whose board included Olivia De Havilland, Lena Horne, Linus Pauling, Dore Senary, Frank Sinatra (the vice-chairman) and F. Y. Harburg, took an advertisement saying, ‘ORSON WELLES NEEDS HELP! He’s doing a terrific job in the matters of minorities and race relations … HE’S DOING THAT JOB FOR US! But – because of his strong & fearless attack – the enemies of freedom are attacking him! YOU NEED ORSON WELLES AND HE NEEDS YOUR HELP!’37 Not everyone was sad to see him go. Yet another lost radio listener and his family wrote to him: ‘We, the People, have been listening to him “tell us off” for some time now. Now it’s time for we, the people, to tell Orson Welles off and set him down a peg or two and get him down off his high horse. He’s been needing someone to give him a piece of our minds and now I think he’s getting it as he deserves.’38 But there was support, some of it in verse: ‘You mustn’t quit – don’t quit, fight one more round/When things go wrong, as they sometimes will/When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill/When the funds are low and the debts are high/And you want to smile but you have to sigh/When care is pressing you down a bit/Rest, if you must – but never quit’39 – words he might well have taken heart from over the next forty years of his life.
The Commentary of 1 September was not only Welles’s last appearance in the series, but very nearly his last appearance on American radio, the medium in which he had earned a living for most of his professional life, and which he had loved in so many and various ways – some admittedly not wisely, but too well. He had understood its possibilities from the moment he started to work in it; he had brought what he learned there to the theatre and to film. Latterly, he had seemed to lose his youthful interest in it as a medium per se; he had become captivated rather by its possibilities as the most direct means of conveying his ideas, unmediated by production of any sort, to the American people. It was a very pure form: just his voice and the listener’s ear.
While he was giving his Commentaries – indeed, while he was still doing Around the World seven times a week until it closed – he was also producing, directing and acting in weekly instalments of the Mercury Summer Theatre of the Air, but any resemblance to its great namesake of the late thirties was largely coincidental. Many of the shows were reprises of former programmes. Around the World was, as we have seen, a shambolic ghost of the previous incarnations of the same story; Abednego a much less vivacious version of the original in the Hello Americans series. Significantly, the most distinguished of them – The Moat Farm Murder, about a murder in rural England – was not written by Welles, but by Norman Corwin, the other most vital force in American radio, who (unlike Welles) had continued to explore its potential, creating some of the most remarkable wartime programmes. The music to Moat Farm and to several other of the shows was by Bernard Herrmann, who continued to bring his very particular sense of the contribution of music to the dramatic soundscape. But there is no question that Welles’s heart was no longer in it. There was an entire absence of the electricity of the original Mercury Theatre on the Air and Campbell Playhouse shows, where the narrative was brilliantly framed, every scene illuminated by some startling detail, each performance freshly imagined and the whole event welded together at white heat by the inexhaustible energy and imagination of Welles himself, throwing himself into the leading role with reckless bravura.
His Summer Theatre version of Moby-Dick – again not by him, but by his friend Brainerd Duffield,40 and originally intended (as Welles rather oddly informs us) for performance by Charles Laughton on disc – is adequate as an adaptation, but utterly without imagination in conception. Welles adopts a voice at once rough and tremulous and has a number of mighty outbursts, but the listener is never taken inside his head or inside Melville’s world; the narration by Ishmael is perfunctory and the eponymous whale is barely evoked at all. Only Herrmann’s music, full of strange harmonics and intimations of majestic movements of the ocean, brings tension or exerts any kind of spell, which is all the more surprising since Moby-Dick – ‘certainly the greatest novel written on American soil’, as Welles describes it – was a lifelong obsession of his, which would finally result in a play on the London stage widely considered, by himself among others, the finest piece of theatre he ever created. The last in the Mercury Summer Theatre series sponsored by Pabst (which nobly confined its plugs to the beginning and end of the programmes) was King Lear, but
again inspiration runs low, and Welles’s own performance is a preview of the sonorously sleepy performance of the part he was to give on television in 1953, itself replicated by all accounts in his stage production of three years later. No, radio was no longer his playground: he had moved on. Or rather, back – back to film.
Welles’s cinematic plans were plentiful and ambitious, especially his plans with Alexander Korda. For those, Welles was looking to his three-picture contract with Korda which was to start in January of 1947, with a film of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae, of which he had not so long ago done a spirited radio adaptation in the This Is My Best series. As we have seen, for Welles adapting something on radio had often been the first step on the path to a future film; Stevenson was a favourite author, another of his enduring boyhood tastes. On this occasion, alas, it was not to be, the difficulties proving insuperable, but his plans for a version of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé were, by September of 1946, very well advanced. His adaptation was predicated on the extraordinary, notion of merging that quintessentially decadent play with Wilde’s great children’s story, The Happy Prince; Wilde himself was to be a character in the film, in a framing sequence set in a Paris café. Vivien Leigh was Welles’s ideal for the psychotic princess; he was keen to cast her partner (and his rival) Laurence Olivier as Herod. ‘If Larry wishes to play Herod,’41 wrote Dick Wilson to Korda, ‘Welles will play anything that Larry doesn’t want to play.’ Cocteau’s designer Christian (Bébé) Bérard was to design the sets and costumes. Korda, asking for preliminary sketches and designs,42 wired back that Bérard might not be available; would Cecil Beaton, who was under contract to him, do? No, wired back Welles, he wouldn’t: if Bébé was busy, what about Tchelitchew,43 Welles’s old sparring partner from the early days of the Mercury, a major and still somewhat shocking figure in contemporary art? And so they bubbled on, everything seeming possible. They planned to film Cyrano de Bergerac (something of an idée fixe with Korda, who had already tried to set it up once with Charles Laughton in the title role), but it fell through, at which Welles declared himself COMPLETELY HEARTBROKEN.44 But there was always Carmen, in Welles’s own version, which retained Merimée’s original framing device of a report on the death of Don José by a representative of the central government, and whose theme would be, in Welles’s words, ‘sex in the raw’. No wonder the devoutly Roman Catholic Joseph Breen, Welles’s old boss at RKO and present head of the Hays Office, would not extend his approval, any more than he had accepted Salomé (‘We regret having to report unfavourably on this well-known play’).45 Welles’s preferred Carmen was Paulette Goddard, but the film, he warned, would only work if they could shoot in Spain and the South of France; this was fine by Korda. Neither Carmen nor Salomé was filmed.