by Simon Callow
Teheran Conference 227
Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 233
Tennent, H.M. 403
Texarkana 208, 210, 211
Thackrey, Ted 225, 226, 236, 248–9, 250, 260, 348
Theatre Arts 348
Theatre Guild 265, 300
Theatre Incorporated 312
Théâtre National Populaire 379
Third Man, The (film) 75, 167, 440
This Is the Army (film) 288
This Is My Best (radio series) 242–3, 345
This Stuff’ll Killya (film) 25
Thomas Committee 412
Thomas, François 389, 397, 399
Thomas, Parnell 413
Three Cheers for the Boys see Follow the Boys (film)
Thrill of Brazil, The (film) 355
Thurston, Howard 192
Time magazine 97, 124, 138, 139, 211, 227
The Times 440
Tiss, Wayne 243
Tito, Marshal 185
To Be or Not To Be (film) 190
To Have and Have Not (film) 382
Toch, Ernst 417
Todd, Mike 281, 284, 287, 290, 315, 316–18
Todd School (Woodstock, Illinois) 13, 160, 277
Toland, Gregg 12, 28, 34, 36, 37, 39, 139, 166, 183
Tolstoy, Leo, War and Peace 189
Tom Brown’s Schooldays (film) 13, 162
Tomorrow Is Forever (film) 224–5, 268, 276, 337
Tone, Franchot 349, 406
Too Much Johnson 312
Toscanini, Arturo 245, 423
Touch of Evil (film) 270
Towers, Harry Alan 406
Trade Union Press 177
Trauner, Alexandre 418
Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The (film) 25
Tree, Beerbohm 388
Trivas, Victor 267
Truman, Harry S. 214, 221, 241, 259, 278, 279, 334, 408
Tunan, Kenneth 427
Tuttles of Tahiti, The (film) 105
Twentieth Century Fox 162, 163, 165
Tynan, Kathleen 32, 133, 178, 179, 224, 241
Tynan, Kenneth xvii
U-Namit-I-Find-It 192
Ubico, Colonel Jorge 229–30
United Artists 4
United Automobile Aircraft and Agricultural Implement Workers 176
United Nations Organisation 224, 238, 239, 255
United Press 124
Universal Studios 35, 267, 269
University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) 30
University of Utah 389
Unsuspected, The (film) 403
Valentin, Karl 202
Valley of the Sun (film) 77, 149
Vampyr (film) 360
Van Nest Polglase 268
Vanity Fair magazine 150
Vargas, Getúlio 72, 73, 98, 112, 113, 155
Variety 168, 288, 304, 311, 390, 391
Vasquez, Jesús 32, 46
Veiller, Anthony 267
Velez, Lupe 138
Venezuela 136
Venice 421, 425, 440
Verne, Jules 287; Around the World in Eighty Days 280
Vertel, Saskia 282
Vidor, King 29
Villa, Pancho 230
Villa-Lobos, Heitor 146
Viva Cisco Kid (film) 13
Vogue 23
Voice of Freedom (radio) 406
Wald, Jerry 400
Waldteufel, Emile 56
Walk on the Wilde Side (film) 382
Walker, Vern 56
Wallace, Henry 187
Wallace, Henry A. 44, 45, 99, 175, 177, 180–3, 213–15, 229, 408, 412; Common Man speech 181–2
Wanger, Walter 218
War and Peace (film) 189–91, 200, 212, 267, 345
War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells), radio adaptation 16, 28, 48, 172, 252, 323
Waring, Judge 341
Warner Brothers 51, 400
Warner, Jack 233
Warrick, Richard 385
Warrick, Ruth 17, 49, 51
Washington 123, 256, 258, 324
Washington Evening Star 184
Way to Santiago, The (aka Mexican Melodrama) (film) 14–15, 30
We Will Never Die (concert) 253
Webb, Roy 110, 417
Webber, Peggy 397
Webster, Margaret 233, 391
The Week 236
Weeks, Odell 333, 334
Weissberger, Arnold 41, 119
Welles, Beatrice (mother) 10, 22
Welles, Christopher (daughter) 54, 222, 348, 397, 433
Welles, Orson, approach to film-making 67–9; birth of daughter Rebecca 221, 222; breakup with RKO 6, 149–50; Bright Lucifer 384, 385; character and personality 133–4, 137; as civilian during 2nd World War 188–9; as comedian 170–2; compendium movie project 8–12; contribution to War effort 191, 194–200, 208–10; and death of Roosevelt 240–2; dynamism of 6–8; and the Edenic paradise 22, 83; European sojourn 402, 415, 443–4; fascination with being American 18; film ideas and projects 188–91, 345, 427; financial affairs 347–8, 405–6; hedonistic and sexual lifestyle 60–1, 63, 92, 255–7; humility of 77; ideas for film projects 7–14; as independent film-maker 155; interest in Brazilian cinema 75–6; interest in popular culture and music 71–4; as a journalist 169, 187–8, 225–42, 244–8, 249–51; lectures given on Brazil 98; love for collaborators 105–6; marriage to Rita Hayworth 198, 222–5, 256–7, 285, 443–4; ‘My Father Wore Spats’ 23; passion for illusion and magic 191–200; political interests 9–10, 43–4, 141, 174–9, 183, 185–8, 213–21, 237–40, 252–5, 278–9, 285–6, 408–13; as public speaker 172–9, 254–5; and racism 172–3, 179, 323–42; radio broadcasts 155–60, 201–11, 241–2, 242–4, 290, 323–43, 406–8; reasons for leaving America 402–3; recordings for Decca 265; relationship to his audience 248–9; and Roosevelt’s election campaign 213–21; skill as an actor 21, 24; and the supernatural 384; throws furniture out of the window in Rio 130; travels across Brazil 82–4; under pressure from RKO and Bernstein 115–20, 123; and vaudeville 191
Welles, Rebecca (daughter) 221, 222, 223, 348
Welles, Richard Head, Senior (father) 10, 22, 23
Welles, Sumner 58
Welles, Virginia (1st wife) 222, 348
Wells, H.G. 48
Whaley, Wade 206
When Strangers Marry (film) 233–4, 349
White, Les 379
White, Walter 323, 326, 327
Whiteman, Paul 307
Whitman, Walt 48
Whitney, John Hay 45, 71, 76, 97
Wiesenthal, Simon 276
Wild, Harry 53, 67, 101, 143, 144
Wilde, Oscar 48, 55, 314, see also named plays
Wilder, Billy 412
Wilder, Thornton 55, 225
Wilkie, Wendell 214, 216
William Morris Agency 207, 243
Willingham, John 338
Wilson, Catherine 106
Wilson, Richard ‘Dick’ 31, 33, 47, 57, 67, 85, 92, 94, 97, 99, 114, 120, 122, 131, 134, 188, 284, 290, 301, 313, 315–17, 318, 319, 321–2, 340, 348, 355, 357, 358, 359, 360, 364, 366, 383, 392, 393, 395, 411–12, 414, 416, 417, 419, 424, 425, 436, 437, 442
Winchell, Walter 307
Windust, John 400
Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare) 265
Winterset (theatre play) 26
Wise, Robert 34, 40, 52, 55, 59, 78, 86, 89–90, 108
Wise, Tobert 91
Wison, Richard 424
Wolfe, Thomas, The Web and the Rock 403
Woll, Matthew 410
Wood, Bret 159–60, 273, 379, 387
Woodard, Sergeant Isaac, Junior 323–42
Woodstock (Illinois) 312
Woollcott, Alexander 55, 225
Woolley, Leonard 49
Workers’ Bookshop Symposium 10
Works Progress Administration 53
World-Telegram 304
Wright, Richard, Black Boy 234–5
Writers’ Mobilisation 172
Writer’s Yearbook 1946 266
Wyatt, Eustace
17, 49, 107, 163
Wyler, William 36, 412
Yalta Conference 229, 334
Yates, Herbert J. 382–3, 402, 416, 417, 437
Young, Loretta 269, 277, 348
Youngman, Gordon E. 125
Zaca (yacht) 358
Zanuck, Darryl F. 189, 378
Ziv, Frederick 406
Acknowledgements
As with The Road to Xanadu, pride of place in the acknowledgements must go the superb Lilly Library and its crack team under Saundra Taylor, as efficient, calm and helpful when I last visited it in 2005 as when I first did, in 1989. It is a real sadness to me that the span of the third and final volume of this biography leaves behind the period covered by the Lilly. Would that there were a similarly streamlined collection to cover the rest of Welles’s life! Other American university libraries have been extraordinarily helpful: Ned Comstock at the University of Southern California and Ann Caiger at the University of California have both pointed me to unexpected corners of their respective collections.
I have naturally depended on the trail-blazing work of my predecessors, Roy Alexander Fowler (Welles’s first chronicler), the late Peter Noble, Barbara Leaming, Frank Brady and Charles Higham. Robert Carringer’s studies of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons have been deeply stimulating, as has V S Perkins’s BFI monograph on the latter film. Michael Anderegg’s Orson Welles: Shakespeare and Popular Culture is a particularly original approach to Welles. The key Wellesian study remains, as it has since publication, James Naremore’s The Magic World of Orson Welles, unmatched in its sensitivity to the cultural and political resonances of the work. Professor Naremore was one of an informal group of readers who read the present volume in manuscript form and all of whom offered invaluable reactions and positive suggestions: any merit the book may have owes a great deal to Naremore, to Simon Gray, Sir David Hare, Fiona Maddocks, Ann Mitchell and Angus Mackay. The book was also read avidly, chapter by chapter as I wrote it, by its dedicatee, Paula Laurence, who lived to read the last sentence of the final page. Helen of Troy to Welles’s Dr Faustus, she was one of the first people to whom I spoke about him, and those early conversations were the foundation stone of an incomparably rich and loving friendship.
Other people – too many of them now gone to the great cutting room in the sky – who offered especial illumination on this period of Welles’s life, some of whom also became good friends, were Roddy MacDowall, George Fanto, Rogério Szangerla, Chico Albuquerque, Miles Kreuger, François Thomas, Kent Hägglund, Norman Corwin, Robert Davison, Alvin Colt. Henry Jaglom and Peter Bogdanovich, staunchly loyal to their friend, were nonetheless extremely cordial to someone with whose views they often strongly disagreed. I must most warmly thank my copy-editor, Chuck Elliott, ever-vigilant on matters grammatical, orthographic and literary, and himself a great source of information about American life in the nineteen-forties; Alex Milner, who collated and coordinated the sprawling manuscript; Dan Franklin, whose reckless faith in the project sustained us all through the book’s more than elephantine gestation; and, yet again, Maggie Hanbury, my agent, who so often understood what I was trying to do better than I did myself. Two secretaries have cheerfully endured the process, Karen Lichkin for nine years and Jane Tomlinson for one; my forbearing partner Daniel Kramer has never known a life with me which didn’t have Orson in it too, but he has never once complained.
In the end, of course, the book has depended on its primary material, in this case, as I indicated in the Preface, of almost bewildering richness. Here, I owe a supreme debt to the generosity and assiduousness of Rosemary Wilton, producer of the excellent six-part BBC series, The RKO Story, who gave me unlimited access to the fruits of her long and hard researches. My old chum Richard France and my slightly newer one, Robert Fischer-Ettl, superb Welles scholars both, shared with me the magnificent research they did on the Isaac Woodard case for a documentary which it is fervently hoped will shortly be made, while Kent Hägglund guided me from his Swedish base through the complexities of Welles’s radiophonic output. Conrad Black, at a moment when he was under a certain amount of pressure, took time to clarify some details concerning Welles’s relationship with Roosevelt not referred to in his magisterial biography. By far the largest corpus of material is, of course, the Mercury archive lodged at the Lilly Library. I should like to pay heartfelt tribute to the man we must thank for its survival, Richard Wilson, who served Orson Welles nobly from his apprenticeship in the thirties through to the late forties when he finally and with a great wrench liberated himself from Welles’s employ, to become a successful producer and director in his own right. Even though technically no longer employed by Welles, he continued to protect and foster his reputation: in my dealings with him I found him deeply sensitive to the memory of a man who did so very little to protect himself or his reputation. It is more than likely that Welles would prefer some of the contents of the Mercury archive to have fallen by the wayside, but if posterity finally appreciates his full complexity and originality, it will be thanks in no small measure to Richard Wilson.
The author and publishers are grateful for permission to reprint the following: excerpt from ‘Airborne Symphony’, words and music by Marc Blitzstein © 1946 Chappell & Co. Inc. Administered by Warner/Chappell Music Ltd, London w6 8BS. Reproduced by permission; excerpt from ‘Wherever They Fly the Flag of Old England’, words and music by Cole Porter © 1946 (renewed) Chappell & Co. Inc. Administered by Warner/Chappell Music Ltd, London w6 8BS. Reproduced by permission; excerpt from ‘The Blinding of Isaac Woodard’ by Woody Guthrie © Copyright 1965 (renewed) by Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Bibliography
Books
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Ambler, Eric, Journey into Fear. Hodder & Stoughton, 1940.
Anderegg, Michael, Orson Welles, Shakespeare and Popular Culture. Columbia University Press, 1999.
Barnouw, Eric, The Golden Web. Oxford University Press, 1968.
Bazin, André, trans. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Orson Welles: A Critical View, Elm Tree Books, 1978.
Behlmer, Rudy (ed.), Memo from David O. Selznick. Samuel French, 1999.
Bogdanovich, Peter, & Welles, Orson, This is Orson Welles. Harper-Collins, 1992.
Brady, Frank, Citizen Welles, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989.
Brecht, Bertolt, ed. John Willett, Journals 1934–1955. Methuen, 1993.
Brogan, Hugh, Penguin History of the United States. Penguin, 1986.
Carringer, Robert, The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction. University of California Press, 1993.
Castle, William, Step Right Up! Putnam, 1976.
Collier, Peter, & Horowitz, David, The Rockefellers. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976.
Cooper, Stephen, Full of Life: John Fante. North Point Press, 2000.
Culver, John C., & Hyde, John, American Dreamer. W.W. Norton, 2000.
Denning, Michael, The Cultural Front. Verso, 1997.
Cover Stories. Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1987.
Eels, George, The Life That Late He Led. 1967.
Ekirch, Arthur, Jr, Ideologies and Utopias. Quadrangle Books, 1969.
Ellington, Duke, Music is my Mistress. W.H. Allen, 1973.
French, Philip, The Movie Moguls. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.
Harrington, Oliver, Why I Left America and Other Essays. University of Mississippi Press 1994.
Higham, Charles, The Films of Orson Welles. University of California Press, 1970.
Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius. St Martin’s Press, 1985.
Sources of Light. Indiana University Press, 1970.
Hodel, Steven, Black Dahlia Avenger. Arcade Publishing, 2003.
Hoogstraten, Nicholas van, Lost Broadway Theatres. Princeton Architectural Press, 1991.
Hughes, Langston, Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP. Berkeley Publishing Corporation, 1962.
Hurst, Richard Maurice, Republic Stud
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Jewell, Richard B., & Harbin, Vernon, The RKO Story. Arlington House, 1982.
Kahn, Gordon, Hollywood on Trial. Boni & Gaer, 1948.
Lasky, Betty, RKO: The Biggest Little Major of Them All. Prentice-Hall, 1984.
Latham, Earl, The Communist Controversy in Washington. Harvard University Press, 1966.
Leaming, Barbara, Orson Welles: A Biography. Viking, 1985.
If This was Happiness: Rita Hayworth. Viking, 1989.
Leiter, Sam, Encyclopaedia of the New York Stage, 1940–1950. Greenwood Press, 1992.
Lyon, James K., Bertolt Brecht in America. Princeton University Press, 1980.
May, Larry, The Big Tomorrow. University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Naremore, James, The Magic World of Orson Welles. Revised edn, Southern Methodist University Press, 1989.
More Than Night. University of California Press, 1998.
Noble, Peter, The Fabulous Orson Welles. Hutchinson, 1956.
Pacios, Mary, Childhood Shadows. 1st Books Library, 1999.
Raeburn, Ben (ed.), Treasury for the Free World. Arco, 1945.
Rivas, Darlene, Missionary Capitalist. University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Sherwood King, R., If I Die Before I Wake. Simon & Schuster, 1938.
Smith, Stephen, A Heart at Fire’s Center. University of California Press, 1991.
Straight, Michael, After Long Silence. W. W. Norton 1983.
Suskin, Steven, Opening Night on Broadway. Schirmer, 1990.
Show Tunes, New York. Dodd, Mead & Company, 1986.
Swanberg, W. A., Luce and his Empire. Scribner’s, 1972.
Tarkington, Booth, The Magnificent Ambersons. Doubleday, Page & Company, 1918.
Thomson, David, Showman: The Life and Times of David O. Selznick. Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Tynan, Kenneth, He That Plays the King. Longman, Green & Co., 1950.
Wood, Bret, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography. Greenwood Press, 1990.
Woodress, James, Booth Tarkington: Gentleman from Indiana. Lippincott, 1955.
Yarbrough, Tinsley E., A Passion for Justice. Oxford University Press, 1987.
Articles
Benamou, Catherine, ‘It’s All True as Document/Event’, Persistence of Vision, Number 7. Film Faculty of University of New York, 1989.
Kamp, David, ‘Magnificent Obsession’. Vanity Fair, January 2002
Kulinak, Katherine, ‘Text of Music: The Magnificent Ambersons’. Cinema Journal, Summer 1988.