by Simon Callow
Welles stayed in Vienna for a week, hobnobbing with his old chum Cotten and somehow managing to get apprehended in a bar in which he was behaving somewhat noisily. ‘The police of four armies have been sent to arrest me,’ Welles declared, according to Sergeant Ken Sheridan, the British duty officer, in his extremely elegant official report of the incident. ‘Mr Welles was a big man, and his bigness spread generously around him. He had several cronies, minions who circled and drifted around his perimeter and tried to emolliate the situation.’ The Russian comrade was not amused, reported Sheridan, and kept his hand on his gun-butt. ‘Mr Welles threw insults around at all of us, but as they were in American English, the Rusky never knew that he was being called a cocksucker.’ Welles was then taken to International Police HQ, which was run by Americans: ‘I learned later that Mr Welles had been greeted with delight and given VIP treatment and a big booze-up with senior officers,’ concluded Sergeant Sheridan.29
His week’s work – a rather light week’s work, it has to be said – completed, Welles returned to Venice and plunged immediately back into shooting Othello. It is not clear what exactly he shot, or whether any of it ended up in the film, but he and Trauner, now contracted to design the film, used the time to crystallise their approach; meanwhile Everett Sloane – a neurotic actor at the best of times – withdrew, no doubt finding the instability of the project too unnerving, which was probably all to the good, though the prospect of Mr Bernstein as Iago is a delectable one.
For the moment, money had to be made if the film was to happen at all. Welles, commissioned to do rewrites on Portrait d’un Assassin – a mad imbroglio about a crazed female impresario who forces a daredevil motorcyclist to perform the loop of death – had transferred his operation to Paris. There, comfortably holed up at the Lancaster Hotel with his old chum Charlie Lederer (currently married to the first Mrs Welles, the former Virginia Nicolson), he settled down to work. Welles was himself to have appeared in the film, which would have added considerably to the calorific content of a cast of positively life-threatening richness: Pierre Brasseur, Maria Montez, Erich von Stroheim, Arletty and Marcel Dallio (not to mention the Fratellini Brothers). In the event, Welles didn’t appear in the film, and was before long being sued for 250,000 francs for not doing so by the producer Jacques Gauthier, who also demanded the return of his advance of 8,000 francs. Welles receives no credit on the film as writer, but is somewhat mysteriously listed by IMDb as having designed the film ‘(uncredited)’. He was everywhere that winter, his skilful fingers in many pies, a sort of celluloid odd-job man; amongst other things, reported Harriet White Medin, he supervised dubbing sessions on foreign movies, including those for The Young Caruso. Everything he earned was earmarked for Othello. On Portrait d’un Assassin, despite the unpleasantness of subsequent legal proceedings, not only did Welles earn a decent sum for the actual writing of the film, but one of the film’s investors, Charles Phiber, a leading industrialist, agreed to underwrite Othello to the tune of 63 million lire.
So Welles must have approached Christmas 1948 with a mixture of feelings: a bruised heart, but the agreeable prospect of playing an excellent part in a good, well-written film, and reasonable hopes for Othello, if he could only secure a decent cast for it. He spent Christmas with the Cottens in their sumptuously decorated penthouse suite at the Lancaster; Cole Lesley, who had come with Noël Coward, almost at the end of his run of Present Laughter, in French at the Édouard VII, was another guest and received as a present a toy rabbit, which, he said, ‘could hop across the room on its back legs while beating two little drums together with its front ones’. Welles, he reported, ‘became insanely jealous of my rabbit and begged me to give it to him – it was four o’clock in the morning by now and the vodka had been flowing – but I couldn’t bear to part with it and refused. He swore to me he would never forgive me and at the last night party of Joyeux Chagrins was still pointing me out to everybody as “that old meanie who won’t give me his white rabbit”.’30 Rita Ribolla noted this curious trait of Welles’s: ‘He loves small toys, always seems to expect them as a present. Maids find (or do not find) them under beds, visitors trip over them, hostesses don’t quite believe what they are seeing; now and then a child unsuccessfully tries to appropriate or successfully swaps one.’31
Despite these displays of perhaps rather forced high spirits, another guest, Elizabeth Montagu, who was the second production assistant on The Third Man, noted that ‘Orson seemed unusually subdued. I suspect,’ she wrote, ‘he disliked playing second fiddle to the irrepressible Coward.’ But the true source of the melancholy revealed itself later, when Welles recounted an anecdote concerning a young actress with whom he had been in love:
She was then living with her parents, and as parental control was very strict, poor Orson was getting nowhere. When it became clear that he would never prise her out of the family circle, he decided that the next best thing would be to invite the entire family to be his guests at a luxury hotel on the Italian Riviera. His offer was gratefully accepted and soon afterwards Orson found himself paying the hotel bills, not only of his lady-love, but also of her parents, two sisters and a brother. As Orson was very much in love, he took the family group in his stride, except for the brother, whom he found obnoxious. However, the weather was still good, the sun shone brightly and long walks along the seashore with his love soon led to a tender relationship. When he proposed to her, she agreed to become secretly engaged to him.32
Welles rushed off to a jeweller’s and the next morning, as they stood by the sea, he produced a magnificent ring, set with a huge diamond that sparkled and glittered in the sunlight:
His fiancée tried it on and admired it, but then took it off her finger, replaced it in its box and put it in her handbag. Orson objected: ‘But why? Why can’t you wear it?’ She smiled. ‘Because I want to be absolutely sure. So, Orson, when you see me wearing it, you’ll know that I truly love you.’ Several days were to pass but the lady’s left hand remained unadorned. Then, one moonlit evening as they walked by the sea, came a dramatic development. They had perched themselves high up on a rock to contemplate the idyllic scene. There was not a sound to be heard except for the sighing of the waves, until suddenly the silence was shattered by a hoarse cry from Orson: ‘The ring, the ring! You’re wearing my ring!’ And indeed, there it was, his ring – and on the correct finger – sparkling in the moonlight. Orson was speechless with happiness. What a girl! And what a lovely, sensitive and romantic way to accept his proposal! He fell on his knees, covering her hands with kisses. But she recoiled. ‘Not so fast, Orson, not so fast. You’ve got it all wrong, this doesn’t mean what you think it means. No, not that at all!’ Orson fell back, stunned. ‘Then what does it mean?’ She seemed embarrassed. ‘Well, I caught my brother in my room today, he was going through my things . . .’ Orson remained silent. ‘Perhaps I didn’t tell you, he’s a habitual thief and I knew he was after the ring.’ Orson didn’t utter a word. ‘So I felt the only thing to do was to wear it – to be on the safe side, so to speak.’33
Welles, recounted Elizabeth Montagu, smiled wryly as he told them this, but they were silent: it was all rather sad. ‘But, I thought, anyone who can tell such a story against himself must have stature, and I soon found myself revising my opinion of Orson Welles.’ This lightly embroidered story – loosely founded on elements of his relationship with Lea Padovani, crystallised into a conte or a parable worthy, in its way, of Guy de Maupassant or Oscar Wilde – is typical of one of Welles’s most characteristic creative procedures: the fashioning of what Isak Dinesen called ‘anecdotes of destiny’, a phrase that perfectly describes a great deal of his work, expressing a view of the world that is at once profoundly romantic, deeply ironic and incorrigibly pessimistic.
CHAPTER TWO
Blessed and Damned
WELLES SHOT virtually all his scenes in The Third Man at Shepperton Studios near London during one week, the third week of January 1949. This t
ight schedule had been imposed on the production by Welles, claiming other commitments, though it is not at all clear what else he was doing around that time. The result was that all the sets involving him had to be ready simultaneously, and a second unit was needed in order to waste as little time as possible; on one particular day Welles worked on eight different sets. The reproduction of both the Prater Great Wheel and the sewers was a considerable challenge, both in construction and in continuity, and it is a tribute to Reed and his team that it is virtually impossible to know what is real Vienna and what is faked – the sort of trompe l’oeil that Welles deployed with such pleasure in his own films. He seems to have been curiously anxious during the week’s shooting, creating such a tense atmosphere around himself that the crew stopped talking to him. ‘Aren’t I in this movie?’ he asked Elizabeth Montagu plaintively. On one notable occasion, during a short section of the crucial Great Wheel sequence, she reported that ‘Orson couldn’t get it right, fluffing his few lines for take after take. I think there must have been twenty-five to thirty before Carol was satisfied. It was very embarrassing for all concerned and even Carol seemed unable to help him. Afterwards, Orson looked completely drained and left the studio without a word.’1
That evening, Montagu asked Cotten what the problem was. Cotten traced it back to their days together at the Mercury Theatre when, he said, Welles had a kind of inferiority complex about acting, ‘especially with me’. There was no question, he said, that Welles was one of the greatest directors of all time, but he was uncertain of himself as an actor. ‘And he knows that I know that.’ This interesting complication in the relationship between the two old friends deeply informs their performances in The Third Man, as it had in Citizen Kane; the idea of betrayal, so familiar in Welles’s films, is nowhere more brilliantly expressed than in his performance in Greene’s deeply uneasy story; it hangs in the air between the two men. Welles ‘knows that I know’: Cotten sees through him, at the very least on the level of acting. Welles was often to express himself, with remarkable honesty, on the subject of his being found out – when he had the chance of meeting Isak Dinesen, the living writer he admired above all others, he ran away from it, for fear, he said, that she would see through him.
It seems extraordinary that such a prodigally gifted individual should feel so exposed, so lacking in a sense of his own worth. In the sphere of acting, the word his fellow-players use over and over again about his work as an actor is ‘insecure’. Sometimes this is a matter of Welles not having learned his lines, or not having given himself time to prepare the part properly. But at a deeper level it seems that this hugely charismatic, formidably imposing man was unconvinced that he was interesting enough. Joseph Cotten was no great actor, but he was utterly at ease with his own body, and conscious of (but not in the least narcissistic about) his handsome features. This amounts to a kind of integrity, an authenticity, which Welles felt he lacked. This tension of course underlies the relationship between Charles Foster Kane and Jedediah Leland in Citizen Kane. Welles frequently spoke of his pride in his skills, and indeed of his natural attributes – he knew that his physical stature and his unique voice were huge assets – but more insistently he expressed dislike of his features (above all his nose) and a deep, almost existential anxiety about what he had to offer, most often choosing to hide himself behind prosthetics or, worse, histrionics.
In The Third Man he does neither. It is a profoundly good performance, exactly what Korda promised Selznick it would be: ‘extraordinary in attraction and superior in intellect’. It is a truly dangerous performance, the depth of the cynicism constantly present just beneath the understated but irresistibly seductive, almost sexual charm. The performance is utterly, believably real, at the same time hinting at some terrible truths about the human condition. He is monstrous, somehow diabolical, this fresh-cheeked, boyish, playful figure. It is hard not to be reminded of Eldred in Bright Lucifer, the play Welles wrote when he was sixteen years old. Greene’s Manichaean Catholicism rears its alarming head in the novella that is the source for his screenplay (and which Welles of course had read): ‘for the first time,’ Greene writes, ‘Holly looked back through the years without admiration: as he thought [of Harry]: He’s never grown up. Marlowe’s devils wore squibs attached to their tails: evil was like Peter Pan – it carried with it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth.’ Along with his Falstaff, who is Harry Lime’s exact antipode, this is incomparably Welles’s best performance. And it is done without make-up. Perhaps that is why he was so insecure; but the end result is a startling, unsettling transparency.
It is interesting to speculate how much Carol Reed influenced the performance. As we have seen, it was Welles’s practice to arrive on a film set with his interpretation, his make-up (which he always devised and generally executed himself), his part and even his shot list perfectly self-created, hermetically sealed and ready to be slotted into the rest of the film. He seems to have attempted to do so with Reed, but the Englishman was a canny operator, with a background in theatre (he was the illegitimate son of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the great Edwardian actor-manager) and possessed of what would nowadays be described as excellent people-skills; he was especially renowned for his ability to direct children. When Welles finally arrived on the fragrant sewer set in Shepperton, he offered Reed a suggestion as to how the scene might be shot: ‘Brilliant, Orson, really brilliant!’ Elizabeth Montagu reports Reed as saying. ‘I wish I had thought of that!’ He then paused and looked around. ‘But as everything is set up to shoot it my way, we’ll go ahead. And then, Orson, we’ll do it again, your way . . .’ After fifteen takes of doing it Reed’s way, Welles had had enough. There were several other similar incidents, says Montagu, ‘until Orson realised he could never win and gave up trying’.2 Another way of expressing it, perhaps, is that after having put Reed through a series of successfully passed tests and challenges – a frequent tactic of his – Welles came to trust Reed.
On The Third Man he only once deployed his normal method of imposing himself on a film – rewriting – and that was a triumph, a huge contribution to the film’s success. The speech he famously wrote for himself at the end of the Great Wheel scene is perfectly phrased, very funny and entirely in character; when he first spoke the lines on the set, the crew (not especially enamoured of Welles, as we have seen) laughed in all the right places. As written by Greene, the last lines of the scene had Harry replying to Holly’s question ‘And Anna – you won’t do a thing to help?’
‘If I could, old man, of course. But my hands are tied. If we meet again, Holly, it’s you I want to see, and not the police. Remember, won’t you?’
Welles amended it thus:
‘When you make your mind up, send me a message – I’ll meet you any place, any time, and when we do meet, old man, it’s you I want to see, not the police . . . and don’t be so gloomy . . . after all, it’s not that awful – you know what the fellow said . . . In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? . . . The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.’
Greene always openly acknowledged Welles’s authorship of these famous lines; Welles in turn graciously insisted that he had cribbed them from a play by a Hungarian whose name he had forgotten, which he had seen when he was a little boy visiting Vienna with his father. To Peter Bogdanovich (with whom Welles recorded a number of conversations that became the book This is Orson Welles) he claimed that he had written every line that Harry uttered, but that is untrue, as the original screenplay reveals. He went further with André Bazin and Charles Bitsch in Cahiers du Cinéma: ‘I created him all round; it was more than just a part for me. Harry Lime is without doubt a part of my creative work.’ This is true enough, but only in the sense that Quasimodo is part of Charles Laughton’s creative work, and Rick
Blaine’s part of Humphrey Bogart’s. In the same interview Welles added, ‘and he’s a Shakespearian character too; he’s very close to the Bastard in King John’. But what makes it remarkable in Welles’s work as an actor in The Third Man is precisely that it isn’t Shakespearean; it’s Greenean. It has nothing of the theatre about it at all. Welles knew that he had been given such a superb entrance – appearing in the fifty-ninth minute of the film, after being referred to fifty-seven times – that he must do nothing: he must simply be. As for his involvement in the script, the question of authorship was always a delicate one for Welles; as it happens, the screenplay of The Third Man, like many, perhaps most, screenplays, is the work of several hands – Greene’s, first and foremost, of course; innumerable contributions, small and large, from Reed; Jerome Chodorov’s reworking of the central characters to Americanise them; unspecified contributions from Maggie Poole, wife of the playwright Rodney Ackland; and an entire substantial layer of plot (the false penicillin racket) derived by Greene from stories shown him by his friend Peter Smollett, né Smolka, the Times correspondent in Vienna, whom Greene knew through his close friend Kim Philby, the British spy (famously dubbed the Fourth Man in the British press).