by Simon Callow
Captain Ahab stalks this period of Welles’s life, as do King Lear and Falstaff and Don Quixote de la Mancha – mighty, mythic figures, as he was himself. The figure of Prometheus also lurks in the background: Orson bound, Orson having his liver pecked out by vengeful birds. ‘The titan, however, has to undergo his punishment precisely because he continuously tries to go beyond,’ in the words of Annamaria Vassalle. ‘He appears to us in chains, tortured by the longing for dominating the indomitable and overwhelmed by the anguish for the inevitable lack of control over what has no limits.’ My approach has changed somewhat from the one I took in The Road to Xanadu, in which I was determined to correct the myths that Welles and others had spun about him. Now I’m more inclined to believe that the man was the myth – or rather, that he grew into his own myth. He passed through the world like a figure from an old tale, a giant and a wild man, like the Orson of the early French romance. This was the authentic way for him to be; he knew of no other way. He is nothing if not egregious. Perhaps his very extraordinariness is the key to him. Peter Brook observed long ago that he was just so much bigger, so much fuller, than anyone else, that it was hard for him to deal with us, and hard for us to deal with him.
Perhaps Falstaff, also huge in every way, is really the key figure. It was the part he loved above all others, the part he played better than all others. In a life that was lived mythically one is tempted to think of him as another Ahab, a second Lear, Don Quixote born again, but in the end it is Falstaff whom he most completely resembles, both in his girth and his profound innocence. Like Falstaff he was mendacious, self-vaunting, crafty, slothful, financially dishonest, indulgent, greedy, exploitative, but like the fat knight, he is also deeply, irrepressibly on the side of life, a force of nature, ablaze with energy. His energy is astonishing and unceasing. But it would not be correct to describe him as a driven man, a Dickens or a Laurence Olivier – men whose goals were clearly defined, and whose very lives seemed to depend on achieving them. Longfellow famously described Dickens as fato profugus – driven, like Orestes, by Furies – and the same might have been said of Olivier. With Welles there was simply a constant supply of energy which could be squandered on anything; he seemed to give himself with equal fervour to all of his projects, whether vaudeville, radio comedy or filming the classics. It was simply in his nature, not a neurotic symptom, simply a physical or maybe a psychical condition. Also, finally, like Falstaff he was a lord of misrule, upsetting convention, upending normal practice and regular relationship; chaos followed in his wake, but the chaos was often invigorating, life-affirming, liberating – even necessary.
In The Road to Xanadu, I described the extraordinary eruption of energy, talent and personality that was the young Orson Welles and traced his impact on the theatre, on the radio and on his times; I ended the book with his arrival in Hollywood and the triumphant creation of Citizen Kane after an alarming period during which, despite his unprecedentedly generous contract with RKO Studios, he was unable to light on a subject which satisfied both him and the studio. Citizen Kane, though not a commercial success, was widely acclaimed as perhaps the greatest film that had ever been made, an astonishing achievement for a young man, barely twenty-five, who had never so much as acted in a film before, much less directed one. In Hello Americans I described the souring of his relations with RKO; the debacle of his aborted wartime project in Brazil, It’s All True, and the subsequent (and to some extent consequent) mutilation by the studio of his second film for RKO, The Magnificent Ambersons; his increasing estrangement from Hollywood; and his refashioning of himself into, firstly, a radio entertainer, then (both in print and on the air) a political commentator. To the envious wonder of the movie-going world, he married Rita Hayworth – and then he divorced her. He made three films in this period, all critically unsuccessful: The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai (with Hayworth) and Macbeth. He returned to the stage with Around the World, a spectacular musical which was a financial disaster. The book ended with Welles – heavily in debt to the Inland Revenue and disgusted with the rise of right-wing demagoguery in America – leaving the United States for Europe, where he would go on to open up new territories of artistic enterprise.
The present volume witnesses what amounts to a one-man diaspora, as he hurls himself around the globe, turning himself into an independent film-maker, running from pillar to post, balancing original work with what the French so eloquently call travaux alimentaires, and trying his hand at pretty much anything that will buy him a few more feet of film. Over the course of thirty years, he shoots a version of Don Quixote, during which time both his Quixote and his Sancho Panza die and the child heroine becomes a middle-aged woman; it is never finished. His life becomes a sort of continuous and barely contained implosion, but somehow, astonishingly, he keeps making films, among them his masterpiece, Chimes at Midnight, a love offering to Falstaff and his creator.
Welles told his semi-authorised biographer Barbara Leaming that when he died there would be no end of books about him. And he was right. Of concurrent and contradictory rival versions of Welles’s story there is never an end. How he would have loved that! Each successive book refuses to acknowledge the discoveries of the one before. That would have amused him, too. But more remarkable yet has been his extraordinary after life: he has appeared in novels, in plays, in films. There is now a whole profession of Orson-impersonator. The man looms quite as large as his work. Like many such great figures – like Dickens, like Balzac – he seemed to know far more than us ordinary people, and at the same time far less. He was one of the most remarkable men of his time. He cannot be extinguished. The spirit goes on.
CHAPTER ONE
The Most Beautiful Baby of 1947
IT WAS money, to begin with, that drove Orson Welles to seek work in Europe. He needed to escape the pressing demands of the Internal Revenue Service, which was hounding him for back-taxes he had incurred during his recent Broadway fiasco, Around the World, so the offer of $100,000 to appear in Gregory Ratoff’s melodrama Black Magic (or Cagliostro, as it was known in some quarters), which was about to start shooting in Italy, proved compelling. Welles, it goes without saying, played the eponymous magus – to the hilt, and beyond, on and off screen, terrorising the set with his extravagant and capricious behaviour. It was the beginning of a relatively brief period in which he played leading roles in films made in Europe; by the early 1950s he settled into occupying the high-powered cameo roles with which he continued to make his living almost to the end of his life. He was candid about his lack of interest in these parts, and indeed in acting altogether: directing was what interested him.
He was continuously erupting with projects, constantly on the lookout for ways in which to make the sort of films that interested him, in the way he wanted to make them. And America in 1947 was clearly not the place where he was going to be able to do that. If he hadn’t worked it out for himself, Charlie Chaplin was on hand to tell him. Hollywood, Chaplin had announced, was dying. ‘Look, if you will, at Orson Welles . . . his career and fate were decided when he said no to the Hollywood magnates. He no longer has a career or life in Hollywood.’1 Both Chaplin and Welles (and the Russian-born Ratoff, as it happens) were under attack in a post-war America that was daily becoming more politically intolerant; all three had been denounced for their supposed communist associations, and all of them were finding it hard to work. Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux – inspired by a story about a serial murderer, suggested to Chaplin by Welles – had left a nasty taste in the mouth of the American public; and Welles’s most recent film, a Macbeth shot in twenty-seven days after a short run on stage, had been received derisively, the latest in a series of flops, not least among them the very public failure of his marriage to America’s sultry sweetheart, Rita Hayworth.
So, on many levels, Welles was not at all unhappy to be out of America. Pastures new! He already had a three-film contract, signed in 1946, with the Anglo-Hungarian producer Alexander Korda, which he still
hoped would come to something, though it appeared to have stalled. Their schemes had included a version of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, which foundered because he and Korda could not agree on casting; a War and Peace, which it is hard to believe either of them ever took seriously (it was supposed to have been shot in Russia during the war); and a Cyrano de Bergerac, which was close to pre-production, but collapsed when Korda sold the rights in the play to the American actor José Ferrer. Welles continued to work on it fitfully with the designer Alexandre Trauner, fresh from his triumph with Les Enfants du Paradis, and the great Provençal writer Marcel Pagnol, while continuing to edit and re-edit his Macbeth in a variety of new versions, each more unpopular than the one before.
He was as project-fecund as ever: he kept working on his modern version of Pirandello’s Enrico Quarto for Korda; he was talking loosely about filming King Lear in America and, more concretely, Othello, but that, he knew, he would never be able to film in America. His business partner Richard Wilson, still gallantly manning what was left of the Mercury office and continuing to steer Macbeth through troubled waters, had investigated the censorship position with regard to Othello: under the heading ‘Sex’, ‘and listed right under “Sex perversion and White Slavery”’, he found Item no. 6: ‘Miscegenation (sex relationship between the black and white races) is forbidden.’2 Wilson had had a conversation with Edward Small, the producer of Black Magic, about filming Othello in Italy; Small wanted to know if it could be done for 100 million lire (the equivalent of nearly $2 million today). Without answering this directly, Wilson reminded Small that the picture would be done entirely on location, partly in Venice, with somewhere else (probably Sicily) standing in for Cyprus, and – rather sensationally, given Welles’s frequently reiterated commitment to black-and-white – that it must be in colour.3
Italy, where Welles remained in readiness for his next film, Prince of Foxes, in which he was to play Cesare Borgia, was clearly the ideal place in which to make the film, for more than purely geographical reasons. Thanks to the strict regulations governing withdrawal of money from the country, Italy was experiencing a boom in film-making: American co-productions, inflated Technicolor historical epics, for the most part; while home-grown production, encouraged by government funding, was having its neo-realistic golden age, led by Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti. Despite post-war economic doldrums, Italy was a bracing place to be.
From the moment of his dramatic arrival in Rome in early November of 1947, six hours late, in a plane that had very nearly run out of fuel, Welles – newly slim, moustached and curly-haired for his role as Cagliostro – plunged straight into the swirling currents of Italian life. Swept away to the Excelsior Hotel, he was required to declare his race; in the hotel’s register he duly entered ‘Negro’.4 His presence in Italy was not reported until two days later, accompanied by a photograph whose caption proclaimed him ‘The Most Beautiful New Baby of 1947’. The following day he held a press conference, at which he was exposed for the first time to Italian Arts Reporting: questions were evenly divided between his alleged espousal of formalism (a heinous crime in neo-realist Italy) and his divorce from Rita Hayworth. In fact, the reporters knew very little about Welles, apart from his split from the most beautiful woman in the world, Citizen Kane, which had not yet been released in Italy, and vague rumours of The War of the Worlds broadcast ten years earlier. Welles brushed aside questions about Rita and elegantly deflected questions about formalism: what interested him, he said, was Italy today. He was hoping to meet both the Prime Minister and the head of the Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti, who, as it happens, was just about to lead the newly fledged republic in a General Strike. Welles never met the Prime Minister, but he did meet Togliatti just a couple of weeks later; they had an amiable conversation over supper, which, Welles told the press, they had conducted in Spanish – a language he had picked up, he said, while fighting in the Civil War;5 new country, new fabrications. The meal was widely reported and, indeed, photographed. What was Welles up to, one wonders? He had not hobnobbed with leading communists in the United States; indeed, he had of late been keeping a low profile, politically speaking. Did he want to make it clear that he was no Hollywood featherweight? Or was he perhaps consciously giving the finger to J. Edgar Hoover? If so, he certainly reached his target: the meeting was feverishly reported by an FBI informant, but the incident – and perhaps Welles himself – was deemed so politically insignificant that shortly afterwards his risk level was officially reduced.6
For the rest, he hurled himself into Roman high society and was enthusiastically welcomed, or so it seemed. In fact, the Roman beau monde clasped the newcomer tightly to its bosom only in order to facilitate a closer scrutiny of his flaws. Welles’s particular form of exuberance was received, in certain quarters, with patrician disdain. As in Brazil in 1942, his immediate embrace of a new culture was characteristically all-consuming. He wanted to know everything, to learn the language, to celebrate its history. This enthusiasm was not wholly reciprocated. The Via Veneto pronounced that he drank too much, that he was too loud, too tall, had too many opinions, too colourfully expressed, chased Italian women too openly and dressed absurdly. He was, in fact, altogether Too American, which is ironic given his highly critical attitude to his native land, and its to him. But Welles arrived at a moment when post-war Italy had suddenly had enough of American largesse, American arrogance, American omnipresence, while still being quite keen on American money.
These attitudes all coalesced with the film Welles had come to make, Black Magic, the highly visible embodiment of America’s presence in Italian life. It afforded work, both for the studios and all the associated ancillary trades. But it also meant that Rome was overrun by foreigners, not least the seventy or so Russian extras that Ratoff had imported, who were tramping all over the Quirinale Palace and other great monuments. The atmosphere on the film was in general somewhat deranged, by no means helped by Welles, who behaved disgracefully throughout, particularly towards the director. Cruelly whimsical, like a Nero or a Caligula, he baited Ratoff mercilessly, arguing relentlessly with him, until he would finally dismiss him with a much-repeated phrase: ‘Grischa, you need a rest.’ Among other caprices, Welles demanded the constant presence on set of three Muses, who were duly recruited from the unemployed population, given contracts and made to sit around looking decorative. He refused to appear at the studio until lunchtime and then quite openly directed his own scenes long into the night; Ratoff’s directing was confined to the morning.7
It is notable that until the day he died, Welles behaved more or less badly on virtually every film he did not direct. The source of this bad behaviour was simple: humiliation. He felt that it was beneath him to appear in other, inferior, men’s work. As much as possible, he took over any film in which he acted. He invariably rewrote his own part: in the case of Black Magic, he attempted – much to the dismay of the director – to turn the character of Cagliostro, a conman and lecher, into a revolutionary figure; often, as he did on Black Magic, he made forceful and hard-to-resist suggestions about the shooting of the scene itself. Thus traces of Welles’s directorial hand are to be found, phantom-like, in many another man’s film; on the whole, and insofar as it is possible to identify them with certainty, they are nothing to shout about. How could they be? The essence of a Welles film is its unique character, his personality imprinted on it from beginning to end. A quick burst of Welles in the middle of someone else’s movie is meaningless, or worse: it makes the rest of the film seem dull, and exposes Welles’s directorial mannerisms.
Black Magic, derived from the elder Alexandre Dumas’s novel Joseph Balsamo, was a subject after Welles’s own heart: not only was magic at its centre, but he had wanted for some years to make a film about the Dumas dynasty. He identified closely with the novelist – a giant, like himself, and, like Welles, very relaxed about other people helping to create the works that went out under his name. Dumas was a quarter black, a
self-proclaimed quadroon, and that too must have fascinated Welles, who was always deeply drawn to black culture of every kind. The film’s producer, Edward Small, was also a Dumas obsessive, and it is framed by Dumas père telling the tale to his son; who knows how Welles would have told the story, but it would surely have been more interesting than Black Magic. Welles’s performance in the film, though he had never been, and was never again to be, in better shape physically, lacks any frisson. As the young Cagliostro, he has some of the charm and most of the energy of the young Charles Foster Kane, but – despite some very intense close-ups of his admittedly beautiful eyes – there is no sense of the magus about the performance, no sense of esoteric energy, no charisma in either the conventional or the theological senses. He makes all the right shapes, but is unable to unsettle us or to surprise us. It is an entirely conventional performance by a far from conventional-looking man. Surprisingly, given Welles’s fascination with magic and the personal power many people experienced coming from him, the performance lacks force.
Welles’s frustration with the film is, of course, understandable: none of the many projects he was brewing for himself to direct showed any sign of happening. And here was a great chunk of mediocrity, with eye-watering budgets and apparently limitless time lavished on it. Many people have these feelings when they work on high-budget movies. But Welles, being Welles, was unable or unwilling to conceal his feelings; he must assert his status. And anyone who failed to acknowledge it, in whatever way (perceived or actual), got it in the neck. Some years later, when Richard Fleischer was working with him on Crack in the Mirror, Welles was approached by the stills photographer, who came over to show him some photos for his approval. ‘Orson drew himself up as though he were a king addressing a scullery knave,’ wrote Fleischer: