Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  not only because of my radio background but also because of Orson’s magnificence as a director. He could focus on a single passage for five hours. The speech, ‘Come, spirits, unsex me here’, we recorded and recorded again and again, finding first one way then another, and then he, like the stimulating director he was, would have yet more ideas. All of us who had worked in radio took special pleasure in our different ways of going about things; with pre-recording you could do the same. We spent days and days having fun recording what we’d already done in the theatre, breaking down each line.

  Fun it might have been, but perhaps not entirely helpful. ‘True, the result was a little disconcerting: hearing the playback was a shock, your brain went back in time. You heard a line you’d recorded in a particular way, which seemed the opposite of what one hoped one had done. Having done it that way, one wanted all the rest to be the same. But it was Orson’s prerogative as director, and he could have gone on playing with the sound forever.’ It is an altogether bizarre procedure; whatever the potential gains, the losses – above all of any kind of spontaneity – would be huge. Apart from anything else, a recording made in a recording studio would have an entirely different feel from the piece performed on the set, with physical actions. Film acting is an unnatural experience under the most propitious of circumstances: the requirements of camera and light are such that actors are called upon to perform every manner of acrobatics (mental and physical) to accommodate them, but generally speaking there is at least a certain freedom of verbal expression – the rhythm, the tempo, the overall shape of a phrase can vary, as the actor in take after take is able to make deeper and better contact with his or her fellow-actors and with the script. If all that has been decided in advance, the performance is wholly pre-determined. It is ironic that Welles, who so loved actors and acting, should have devised such an inhibiting procedure. It meant, of course, that his authority over the performance was absolute: by rehearsing and re-rehearsing the actors’ vocal performances until they were perfectly to his satisfaction, and then recording them, he could ensure complete conformity to his intentions. Not even Hitchcock at his most domineering ever imposed such rigid control over his actors.

  Shooting began on 23 June. As he would do again on later films, Welles deliberately chose an apparently impossible schedule for his first day’s filming to make a clear and readily understood statement of his mastery. At the beginning, the atmosphere on the set was not good, the crew surly and uncooperative. ‘They were really hateful,’ Nolan told François Thomas:

  They wouldn’t cooperate in any way, they resented him so much that they seemed to have only one purpose in life, to show him he had no right to be there. When we started, we got nothing but sarcasm, resistance and negativity. The first day of the shoot, we began at 9 in the morning. It was a long take, several minutes, the murder of Duncan. There were dozens of camera positions. Everyone insisted that Orson had no chance whatever of doing it. And at five past midnight, when he’d got exactly what he always knew he’d get, everyone was eating out of his hand – they gave him a round of applause. And the next day, they were very grateful to be under the same roof as him. For me, that was the high point of the film.

  The cinematographer, one of Republic’s house team, was John L. Russell, but he too, like Fred Ritter, was more of an executant than a collaborator, and needed to be galvanised. To accomplish everything that was needed in the three and a half weeks of the shoot, enormous energy was required, and Welles supplied it in overplus. Shooting took place on two sets; while one was being prepared, they would shoot on the other. With the cameramen using hand-held camera operators darting among the warriors in the battle sequences, wearing masks on the backs of their heads to blend with the throng, the soundtrack blaring away, and Welles and the crew roaring over it – even when Welles was in a scene, but not actually in shot – the atmosphere bordered on the hysterical. As they moved from one set to another, Welles cheerily shouted to Alan Napier, ‘RUN, don’t walk! Remember, this is a B-movie.14 Time is money!’ Roddy McDowall, frankly unenthusiastic about Welles in general, found acting with him unnerving: ‘One eye was on you, the other was sort of mad … as if he had two completely separate eyes.’15 Once Welles gave the young actor an observation about some unsatisfactory aspect of his performance: McDowall, partly by way of explanation, muttered: ‘I’m so hot.’ Welles, thinking he’d said: ‘So what?’ raged at him so long and so extravagantly that McDowall, young as he was, understood that Welles was operating at a level of adrenalin that rendered him almost out of control. During one take, a high, keening noise was heard – one of the cameramen, an epileptic, was in the throes of a seizure. Welles, still in the scene though not on camera, shouted above the unnerving wail: ‘Let the fucker have his fit. Keep shooting.’ To McDowall, ‘there was a streak of contempt running right through that man … he was too talented to behave that way continually’. Nolan, on the contrary, adored every moment of it, with one exception: the famous soundtrack. ‘God, I’ve never experienced fear like the first time I heard that huge sound, wiping everything else out, that thunderous, unrecognisable voice – mine, no doubt about it – filling the whole of the vast sound stage at Republic. And I was supposed to act with that voice booming in my ear! I could only see one way out, to run away into the night and forget it all. Later, they turned the volume down and we adjusted to the technique.’ But even a willing accomplice like Nolan finally drew the line. ‘Actually, we did the sleepwalking scene without playback. I asked Orson to let me do it exactly the way I had in the theatre and he did.’

  The actors were willing if bewildered, but the somewhat jaded extras, by now no doubt longing for their chaps and Stetsons, needed serious galvanising. This was a different sort of challenge, to which Welles rose with accustomed resourcefulness. At the end of one long morning, requiring a sudden rush of energy towards the castle from Macduff’s soldiers, he had trestle tables laden with food set out on the other side of the mound; instead of calling ‘Action’, he roared ‘LUNCH!’ The resulting sequence is visibly more animated than elsewhere. Welles was winning. The hard-boiled writer-producer Jerry Wald and his colleague John Windust of Warner Bros visited the shoot. Wald wrote to Welles: ‘The important thing to me was the excitement that you generated on the set. Everybody seems to be pitching for the picture.’16 Wald had seen some of a rough assemblage of the material and proclaimed himself impressed. ‘From what we saw on the screen, the extra work is certainly justified. Both Windust and I came away tremendously enthusiastic about what you are getting.’

  Shooting ended a couple of days after Wald’s visit; Herbert Yates celebrated the event with a ringing letter of acclaim. ‘From the human side, once again you have made history in Hollywood. The job you have done has not only served as an inspiration to your own cast and crew, but to every other company on the Republic lot – in fact, in every studio in Hollywood.’17 He particularly praised Welles for his good husbandry:

  In this day of rising costs and sky-rocketing budgets, it has become mandatory to all of us involved in the business of making motion pictures to do everything in our power to make it possible for us to stay in business. You have demonstrated beyond a doubt that superior product can still be made within reasonable cost and with assurance of a justifiable return. – Again I salute you and congratulate you on the greatest individual jobs of acting, directing, adapting and producing that to my knowledge Hollywood has ever seen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Welles of Onlyness

  AT THIS POINT Welles disappeared to Europe for a twenty-five-year exile from which he would only return briefly and occasionally, leaving behind him a soundtrack and three weeks of loosely assembled footage. It was three years before the finished film would achieve anything like a general release, and when it did it was in such truncated and refashioned form that it was scarcely the film he had shot. Once again, his work had been confiscated from him. It is hard not to detect a pattern of sorts. Had he learned nothi
ng from his absence from the post-production process on The Magnificent Ambersons? He knew from bitter experience that long-distance, remote-control editing was all but impossible, to say nothing of absence from the increasingly important preview period at which studio executives were prone to panic. With The Stranger he had ceded final cut in his contract; The Lady from Shanghai was always in Harry Cohn’s ruthless hands. But with Macbeth he was dealing with very different people: Yates was no monster in the Cohn/Spiegel mode, and Republic was not a palace of the Borgias, like RKO and Columbia, rife with schemers and counter-schemers. At Republic Welles was admired, even revered, as Herbert Yates’s letter to him makes clear. He would certainly have been allowed and encouraged to make the cut he wanted. And yet he went. The student of Welles’s life feels like the audience at a melodrama: ‘Don’t go!’ one wants to cry, ‘Finish the film!’ But off our hero canters, oblivious to the destruction of all his dreams.

  The immediate motive for Welles to leave America was a financial one. The exotic actor-writer-director Gregory Ratoff had invited him to play the leading role of the eighteenth-century heretic, magician, conjuror and Freemason, Count Cagliostro, in a screenplay derived from Dumas’s Diary of a Doctor. Shooting was to take place in Italy; Ratoff, the movie’s executive producer Edward Small and Welles’s agent all besought him to accept the role, but Welles made himself hard to get, though it was obviously a part (and an author) after his own heart. (One of the many projects he had canvassed as a possible follow-up to Citizen Kane had been the life of Dumas.) DEAR ORSON, Ratoff wired him only weeks before shooting was due to begin, YES OR NO PLEASE CALL ME.1 Welles replied: IF I MUST GIVE YOU A DEFINITE ANSWER TODAY, THEN THAT ANSWER IS NO. At this point the agent weighed in. BELIEVE ME AS YOUR FRIEND I BEG YOU NOT TO TURN THIS DEAL DOWN.2

  Welles was now in some demand as an actor; a little earlier, Michael Curtiz, director of Casablanca, and still riding the crest of the wave created by his recent hit Mildred Pierce, had written to ask Welles in the most flattering terms to appear in The Unsuspected: ‘You will readily see that the character of Grandy was written with you specifically in mind.3 The man is an unusual, charming, suave, hypnotic individual with a touch of the genius about him, and all of us feel that no one could bring him to the screen with the same finesse and understanding which you could give to the characterisation.’ Welles was in the midst of shooting The Lady from Shanghai at the time of the offer, so he could not have played the part if he had wanted to (eventually it went to Claude Rains, which suggests that the role must have been rather flexible), but it is indicative of his new reputation as an actor – or at any rate as a commanding presence on screen – that his agent seriously advised him to give up directing movies and stick to appearing in them. There was also persistent demand for his services in the theatre: Gertrude Lawrence asked for him to star opposite her in an adaptation of Thomas Wolfe’s posthumously published novel The Web and the Rock; Welles didn’t do it, nor was it ever apparently done, but the story would not have been without resonance for him, concerning as it does a love affair of Wolfe’s autobiographical alter ego, George Webber, so traumatic that he abandons America to seek in an older culture the stability he could not find in his native land (though it is to be doubted whether stability was ever part of Welles’s quest).

  ANTA was desperate for his services and pursued him unrelentingly, though by far the most intriguing offer came, perhaps significantly, from Europe – from Britain, to be precise. John Perry of the West End management H. M. Tennent wired Welles to ask whether he’d be interested in playing the part of Titus Andronicus under the direction of the twenty-two-year-old Peter Brook at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, in settings by Jacob Epstein.4 It would then transfer to the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith. This preceded by some seven years Brook’s famous and sensational production (not designed by Epstein, and starring Laurence Olivier), which ushered in Olivier’s greatest period of classical performances, in a role hitherto thought unplayable, and indeed hardly worth playing. SORRY, Welles replied, COMMITMENTS MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE CONSIDER YOUR INTERESTING OFFER.5 BEST WISHES. Another spurned call from destiny; or maybe not. Perhaps it just seemed like an interesting but irrelevant possibility.

  Much more in the forefront of Welles’s mind was a theatre production that he planned to stage, an ‘oratorio’ version, as he called it, of Moby-Dick, the text to be written by Brainerd Duffield. Duffield had written the 1946 radio version of Moby-Dick, itself a spin-off, as we have seen, of yet another project originally conceived for Charles Laughton. (Welles, incidentally, had sent a very comradely, if perhaps ever so slightly ambiguous, telegram to Brecht, Laughton and John Houseman on the first night of Galileo: I HOPE GALILEO IS EVERY BIT THE SUCCESS YOU WANT IT TO BE).6 The ‘oratorio’ version of Moby-Dick had been commissioned by the San Francisco Theatre Association, which was waiting impatiently for it, as was C. B. Cochran in London (ARRIVING SEPTEMBER 15TH, wired Welles to Alexander Korda, FEAR CAN’T GIVE MOBY-DICK SUFFICIENT PRE-CHRISTMAS PREPARATION THEREFORE ADVISING COCHRAN SEEK THEATRE FOR SPRING); so too, according to Welles’s French supporter Maurice Bessy, was the Comédie-Française.7 ‘Please answer, urgently, when you will produce your oratorio in London,’ wrote Bessy, ‘and when, eventually, the show can start in Paris.’8 Welles replied that he’d do it in London in April 1948, in Paris the following month.

  Thus, cheerily, he disposed of his time, little thinking of the languishing reels of Macbeth (or, indeed, whether or not he had a script for Moby-Dick). It obviously made sense for Welles to be in Europe, since he was committed to making a film with Korda, though exactly which one was still unclear. They had worked intensively on Salomé; the actor-writer Fletcher Markle had been with Welles in Acapulco working on it while he filmed The Lady from Shanghai. They had planned to be in production with the film, possibly even in America, in the summer of 1947. IT IS ALMOST CERTAIN I WILL HAVE FOR SALOME THE PERSON I TOLD YOU ABOUT ON TELEPHONE, Korda wired Welles in January of that year.9 SHE IS AVAILABLE ONLY BETWEEN FIFTEENTH OF APRIL AND END OF JUNE THEREFORE IT IS IMPERATIVE YOU SHOULD NOT TAKE ON ANOTHER JOB HERE. Two months later he was complaining: YOU TOLD ME YOU COULD START IN AMERICA EARLY. Clearly, though, Korda had not raised the finance required.10 WHO WOULD YOU DO IT WITH QUERY WHAT SORT OF ASSOCIATION COULD WE HAVE WITH AMERICAN PRODUCTION COMPANY FROM THIS SIDE. Meanwhile Korda pressed hard for the Scottish actress Eileen Herlie (the ‘person’ referred to in his telegram) to play the title role, which Welles had earmarked for his current girlfriend, the French nightclub star Barbara Laage, twenty-one years old and, on the face of things, a much more likely candidate to play Wilde’s barely pubescent anti-heroine; Miss Herlie had just filmed the role of Gertrude for Laurence Olivier, which would certainly have constituted a most unusual double. Their divergent views on this issue proved to be an insuperable obstacle, and so when, early in 1947, José Ferrer postponed the film he was planning to make of Rostand’s great play Cyrano de Bergerac, Welles and Korda, who had toyed with the idea a year earlier, eagerly turned their attention back to it.

  The prospect of Welles as the proboscially-challenged Gascon is a fascinating one, the apotheosis of all those nasal appendages of which he was so fond; but Cyrano is at core a swordsman, and it is a little difficult to imagine Welles finding the dexterity to time his hexameters to his duelling strokes, as Cyrano must. Korda had already spent a frustrating year, a full decade earlier, trying to make a film from the play. In that case the leading part was to be played by Charles Laughton – also not, perhaps, nature’s idea of a nimble swordsman, though no doubt Laughton’s unhappy relationship with his own appearance would have led to remarkable insights. It is particularly hard to imagine Welles in the capacity of a vulnerable lover. Interestingly, he told Peter Bogdanovich that he had intended to change the plot so that Cyrano – instead of nobly aiding Roxane’s handsome but tongue-tied young suitor Christian, by lending his own eloquence to the young man – intended to betray him, revealing t
hat the eloquent voice to which she had surrendered her heart had been his (Cyrano’s), and not Christian’s at all, but that he was prevented from doing so because Christian dies in battle, and honour obliged him to do the noble thing. Welles said that he believed Cyrano should be a short man, so they were going to make all the furniture larger. He said he would have made his nose get smaller and smaller as the film went on, till at the end you hardly noticed it. He said an awful lot of wonderful and witty things about it, but this project, too, foundered before long, partly because Welles had agreed to do Cagliostro (or Black Magic as it was to become).

  The money ($100,000) was certainly welcome. His financial affairs were as chaotic as ever, scarcely aided by the loss of several boxes of records on a train journey between White Plains and Grand Central; and a lawsuit doggedly pursued since 1941 by Franchot Tone, still determined to secure money promised to him by Welles at the time of the unfilmed Dolores del Rio project Mexican Melodrama, came to court again, producing this agreeable exchange: