Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  Q: Mr Welles, have you ever had your deposition taken before?11

  A: No, not deposition. I have been sued. No such ceremony similar to this has occurred in my memory. That is all I can answer in truth.

  Q: Was it in the year 1943?

  A: I have answered that I don’t have a good recollection in this matter.

  Q: Was it in the spring, the summer, the fall or the winter?

  A: We live in California. It is hard to determine the seasons.

  Witty and nonchalant Welles might remain, but his sources of income were drying up; radio in particular was now a no-go area for him. There were various offers, all of them with intolerable limitations attached; and from time to time someone would come up with some trivial novelty formula that seemed to suit him, such as Frederick Ziv’s notion of a programme featuring a ‘climax scene’ three minutes into the show, the kind of wonder idea that advertising agencies were always trying to urge on him. Curiously, even his radio prospects were better abroad: the young English producer Harry Alan Towers, hearing that Welles was planning to come to Europe, offered him $1,500 a week to do a radio transcription programme. But in his own country he was essentially persona non grata.

  Before shooting on Macbeth began, in the middle of June 1947, Welles (unable to attend in person) had contributed a recorded speech to be played at a Voice of Freedom lecture: there had been a phenomenal rush on tickets, ‘largely because your name topped our list of speakers, even though we most honestly noted that it was Orson Welles in transcription’.12 It is a remarkable theatrical image, a paradigm of the medium itself: a recording about the threat to radio played to an audience listening to him, not in the flesh, but exactly as they would listen to the radio. It is also a historical moment, a last testament to the importance and seriousness of radio on the very brink of the television age. It must have made then – and makes today – remarkable listening. The speech is obviously improvised, freely associating and more than a little overwrought, signalling that what Welles has lost is far more than a secondary career. Beyond that, it tells us a great deal about Welles’s state of mind in the months before he left America. ‘The people is heroic and suicidal,’ he says.13 ‘The people is everybody. This grand, mind-staggering “we” – yes! It is all of us – all and every one of us.’ A highly charged emotional vibrato informs his voice. ‘A government dedicated to the sanctity of the unpopular, a reputation thoughtfully attuned to the unimportant vote. Which guards as national treasures the minorities.’ He senses that everything in which he and his fellow-radicals believed – the old Popular Front, Roosevelt – is falling apart while they look on powerlessly:

  We the people, where are we headed now? Backwards. We have become the pilots of suicide. Fearful, perversely fearful of our scheduled but rejected greatness: when the ideal dies so dies the civilisation which was supported by it. It may be that this ideal of ours is only hibernating. But there are no signs of a spring. The Roosevelt Democratic Party was not a political party – it was a way of life for most of us who work for a living – the good cheer for most Americans born into darkness … that way has become a conspiracy: we stand accused of every black brand of disloyalty. We are no longer spokesmen because we cannot speak. Not one of us is small or casual enough to escape attention.

  It is strange, almost moving, to hear Welles speak of himself as small. ‘Ours was an argument which carried its own eloquence. They kicked us off the air, the old, old interests of aggregated wealth. It is radio and this strange new medium of radio silence that is the subject. The Truman doctrine was not handed down from some tablets of the law. FDR won his campaigns – all of them – on the air. Freedom of assembly – airtime was our meeting hall and we are now denied its use – a killing censorship or else collaborate or else it was all very pleasant and urbane.’ He becomes less controlled; the suspicion grows that he may be in his cups, as he tells his audience:

  Free speech has been politely and unobtrusively murdered – we had nothing to lose but our microphones. Your obedient servant as a result of his efforts as a radio commentator has been successfully muffled now even in his old profession of radio actor. Not that he hasn’t had some offers. The radio you know is always available if you’ll promise never to use the radio to say anything. A big, big manufacturer of breakfast food, for instance, sent out a feeler lately. Five broadcasts a week at big, big money might be mine if I would undertake to deal exclusively with (what I must take to be unconscious irony) the ‘human interest side’ of the news. There was an even longer string than that attached to it. The proposed contract covered not only air-time, but all my waking time. Every public utterance was to be checked for content with a special board of advertising agency ideologists. In a word, they were putting up a heap of dough to buy outright a man’s long-term opinion … it’s more than possible that radio is happier without me, but I can speak for my fellow spokesmen and I do. They were most necessary debaters. The debate was most necessary. Now the debate is closed. It must be opened. And now thank you and until the next time – until our American radio is free again …

  He ends, particularly poignantly, with his customary valediction: ‘I remain as always – obediently yours.’

  Political despair is a powerful emotion. Perhaps most bitter to endure is the sense that the party that one would naturally support is betraying its own ideals. It is a kind of stalemate: there is nowhere to go. Truman, with his shady antecedents deep in the bowels of the southern Democratic machine, seemed to be betraying every aspect of his legacy from Roosevelt, alienating many of his own supporters to such a degree that an overwhelmingly Republican Congress had just been voted in. Welles’s favoured candidate, Henry Wallace, Vice-President before Truman outmanoeuvred him for the job, was regrouping; his cause was as yet a somewhat unpopular one, though he spoke with peerless eloquence for the radical Left, even talking of founding a new party ‘to let the people of the world know that those who believe in peace and understanding still have some means of expression.14 It would provide the evidence that the United States had not gone completely imperialistic and psychopathic’ But Welles was not at his side. It fell to Katharine Hepburn to speak on Wallace’s behalf, seizing the opportunity to denounce the House Un-American Activities Committee, presently investigating the communist influence in Hollywood; in the words of Gordon Kahn, she ‘literally seared the ears off the [right-wing] Motion Pictures Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals’. The temperature of the Cold War was plummeting, exactly as predicted in Welles’s Almanac and in the pages of Free World, the threat of nuclear war an ever-growing possibility, but Welles was silent.15 His response to the idea of involvement in political activity, once unquestioned, seemed to falter. He told the Citizens Committee on Displaced Persons (whose members included Eleanor Roosevelt): TERRIBLY SORRY BUT MY MONEY IS ALL SPENT IS THERE ANY OTHER WAY I CAN HELP BEST WISHES.16 And when he was asked to speak against a proposed broadcasting bill in terms he would have been unable to resist not so very long ago – THE MIGHTY ‘WE’ LIKE YOU WOULD FOCUS ATTENTION OF NATION ON EVILS OF BILL REACTIONARIES TRYING TO RUSH THROUGH QUIETLY SINGULAR CONTRIBUTION TOWARD RETAINING AT LEAST SEMBLANCE OF FREEDOM OF AIR BILL WOULD COMPLETELY WIPE OUT – he replied that he was in the midst of filming Macbeth and could not write anything new.17 For most people, this would have been a perfectly straightforward response, but it was quite out of character for the Welles of the early nineteen-forties. Something had died in him. That thing was hope.

  As far as film was concerned, his confidence that he could persuade anyone to let him make the films he wanted to make – the films that were needed for the coming dark hours – had disappeared. He wrote to Louis Dolivet at the end of 1946 to inform him that ‘after weeks of haggling begging bargaining and generally busting my neck’, he was unable to get their ‘atomic bomb picture’ off the ground.18 ‘I must report that this industry is even worse than I thought it was.’ Perhaps Europe – the Europe of Ophüls, de Sica, Renoir – would have a m
ore sophisticated response (both political and literary) to his cinematic vision; it would also be considerably cheaper to film there. In America, even the films he had managed to get made were released without fanfare, or sometimes not released at all. Harry Cohn had inexplicably held up distribution of even the mutilated and musically bastardised version of The Lady from Shanghai for at least six months; it would be another six months before it was seen. Almost equally significant for Welles was the industrial unrest in Hollywood, from which he had suffered personally during the shooting of the Crazy House sequence: he, one of Labor’s most outspoken supporters, had been picketed, hectored, denounced by union members. This was a strictly personal matter: Welles had taken it upon himself to do the job of qualified men. Like many of us, he was something of a political nimby, an enthusiastic proponent of the right to strike if it was in factories in Delaware or railroads in the south-west; not so welcome if it interfered with one’s own work.

  More threateningly, he had also suffered sharply from the growing power of the right wing within the film craft unions: in September of 1946, before shooting on The Lady from Shanghai had begun, the Hollywood Reporter approvingly noted – under the headline HOLLYWOOD STARS ARE BLASTED AS ‘REDS’ BY AFL OFFICIAL – that Matthew Woll, a vice-president of the American Federation of Labor, the dominant force in American unionism, had threatened the motion-picture industry in his union’s paper, American Photo Engraver, with a ‘league for political decency’ and a nationwide picketing of movie-houses ‘unless the movie industry takes steps at once against many high-salaried stars and script-writers who are part of a Communist fifth column in America. Hollywood today,’ wrote Woll, ‘is the third largest Communist centre in the United States.’19 As an egregious example, he singled out Welles alongside Edward G. Robinson, Myrna Loy, Burgess Meredith, James Cagney and Lionel Stander, among several others. In a comprehensive and not unsophisticated denunciation of the creative community, he continued:

  Ashamed of the meaningless roles in which they are cast, oppressed by a sense of guilt because of their swollen incomes, smarting under the taunts of superior but non-Hollywood intellectuals, these world-savers in greasepaint find refuge in the Communist Party or its peripheral organisations. Somehow, playing at revolution seems to justify the possession of a swimming-pool and improves the taste of Astrakhan caviar and the feel of Russian sables. Ill-equipped either by experience or learning, these light-minded mimes imagine they are doing something for the oppressed of the world. Actually they are permitting themselves to be used as window-dressers for the most tyrannical political system in the world today, a system which crushed all human liberty and all human dignity.

  The mixture of panic and contempt perfectly expresses the temper of the times, to which is added a naked loathing of the acting profession. ‘The sharpening conflict between loyal American patriots and the subversive members of Stalin’s fifth column in this country makes a show-down imperative. This conflict is well under way in the American Labor movement.’ Woll’s attack is a vintage and chilling example of early Cold War rhetoric, confirming everything Welles had ever said about the right-wing influences in Hollywood. Woll’s clinching argument was exactly the point, from a diametrically opposed position, that Welles and his fellow Popular Front affiliates had been making for years: ‘The movies are not only a means of entertainment, they are also an important instrument by means of which our youngsters are unconsciously influenced in their social and political thinking. If stars like Orson Welles,’ Woll ended, menacingly, ‘continue to flout American patriotism, then loyal Americans will stage a protest which these sponsors of totalitarianism will not soon forget.’

  Three of the light-minded mimes in question responded to the article. Myrna Loy – just months earlier acclaimed for her superb performance in The Best Years of Our Lives, a tireless worker during the war for the Red Cross, voted ‘Queen of the Movies’ a decade before and undentably popular ever since – denied everything. Edward G. Robinson responded with a magnificent philippic starting, ‘I shall continue in the future as I have in the past to contribute as much of my time and energy as possible to the American democratic way of life’ and ending, ‘if you think I am guilty of treason, or engaging in subversive activities, then it is your duty, as an American, to report the matter to the authorities to take action against me. In other words, PUT UP OR SHUT UP.’20 Welles denied nothing, and averred nothing, maintaining a position of legal formality. ‘I definitely intend to take some action as a result of the libellous statements made concerning me. I am today consulting with my attorneys to decide exactly what form this action will take.21 I intend to protect my legal rights and protect my name against scurrilous attack by whatever legal means my attorneys advise, probably by lawsuit.’ A month later, the Hollywood Reporter withdrew its endorsement of Woll’s statement; the following week it carried a front-page apology: after investigations by its own reporters, it declared that ‘a grave injustice has been done to Mr Welles’, Welles was again silent.22

  By curious chance, the same edition of the paper in which Woll’s denunciation had first appeared carried a report in which Alexander Korda announced that Welles would start shooting Salomé in England in January of 1947; he already appeared to be distancing himself from Hollywood. The whole period in Hollywood was one of savage industrial conflict – union against studio, and union against union. The crafts unions were at war with each other, the right-wing IASTE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Operators) being violently opposed to the ultra-radical CSU (Conference of Studio Unions), which was behind the jurisdictional strike by 400 AFL members that was bringing Hollywood close to a standstill – the same strike that Dick Wilson identified as holding up shooting on The Lady from Shanghai. ‘Shall the studios remain open or shall they be forced to close their doors?’ asked the Hollywood Reporter.23 In October 1946, Roach, Goldwyn and Republic summarily dismissed all their CSU members. There was intimidation and hysteria; in November of the same year, IATSE took out a box-ad in the paper, offering a reward of $5,000 for information leading to the conviction and arrest of the parties responsible for the bombing of the home of one of its members. The SAG (Screen Actors’ Guild) was uncertain as to whether its members should cross the picket lines; eventually – urged on by keynote speaker Ronald Reagan – it was decided that they should. Under the influence of the dapper reactionary Adolphe Menjou, SAG was moving rapidly rightwards; it took out a large advertisement claiming that a small percentage of the CSU did not want the strike settled and were simply trying to destroy the system. Things were moving away from the realm of the idealistic politics that Welles had so eagerly embraced.

  He was one of 339 motion-picture celebrities who had protested against the investigation of the motion-picture industry by the House Un-American Activities Committee, but he made no individual statement. Henry Wallace was again fiercely eloquent in denunciation, attacking ‘the group of bigots first known as the Dies Committee, then the Rankin Committee, now the Thomas Committee – three names for fascists the world over to.24 roll on their tongues with pride’. But Welles, who had spoken with such courage on the most incendiary of topics, said nothing. And yet he was in the forefront of the attacks. Melvyn Douglas sent him a clipping from the Denver Post of 10 August 1947 describing how the vaudevillian, revue artist and character actor Frank Fay had launched an attack on communists in Hollywood: ‘Orson Welles – red as a firecracker/Charles Chaplin – oh boy, probably one of the reddest Reds I ever saw/Melvyn Douglas – his real name is Hesselberg. He holds meetings in his house.’ And he ended with a call to arms: ‘Don’t let the reds get a hold anywhere – not even a little hold.’

  Welles said nothing, nor is there any record of any response of his to the telegram sent to him (and many others) by John Huston, William Wyler and Billy Wilder: THIS INDUSTRY IS NOW DIVIDING AGAINST ITSELF UNITY MUST BE RECAPTURED OR ALL OF US WILL SUFFER FOR YEARS TO COME YOUR AID IS REQUIRED IN THIS CRITICAL MOMENT �
�� THIS IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANY PICTURE25 YOU EVER MADE. Perhaps he was only interested if he initiated the activity; perhaps his lawyers had advised him to keep quiet, though, as we have seen, he was not particularly vulnerable. The FBI, for all its vigilance, had never managed to establish him as a member of the Communist Party (and even had they been able to do so, of course, such membership was not a crime). But in the words of Eric Barnouw, historian of American radio, ‘the year 1947 was dominated by monomania.26 The concern of the nation was a search for traitors, who might be anyone, including your neighbour – especially your neighbour.’ John Cromwell, the director, described it as being like a small Terror, ‘with a small-town Robespierre and a committee doling out the future of a great many people’.27 In September of that year, the screenwriters and directors who came to be known as the Hollywood Ten were subpoenaed; a month later they were brought before the committee, and a month after that, having refused to answer the sixty-four-dollar question (as Parnell Thomas called it) as to whether they were then, or ever had been, members of the Communist Party, they were in prison, for contempt of Congress. And still Welles was silent. The point is not to lay blame: Welles was perfectly within his rights to keep his own counsel. It is simply that it was so unlike him. It would appear that he had given up on America.

  His mood, in general, was not good, nor indeed was his health; he had been plagued by an ear infection throughout the early autumn, not throwing it off until October. Writing to Arthur Margetson, he observed that ‘even my few remaining friends like you have joined the majority opinion on the Welles question.28 If you plan therefore to spit upon me in the streets be advised there is a considerable waiting list … my dearest love goes with this in case you care about that.’ FROM THE WAY YOU SOUND, Bruce Elliott, author of Magic as a Hobby, wired him in response to a letter signed ‘your ever-erring chum’, apologising for non-delivery of a promised preface, YOU SHOULD CHANGE YOUR NAME TO WELLESCHMERZ THESE DAYS.29 THE ATOM BOMB GOT YOU? OR IS IT JUST YOUR MANIC DEPRESSIVE CYCLE?