by Simon Callow
And Welles’s contributions, both thespian and verbal (he also added some well-placed lines about digestive tablets, which echo nicely with the pseudo-penicillin drugs Harry is peddling), are very much part of what makes the film so good. Like Casablanca and Four Weddings and a Funeral, it is a triumph, above all, of chemistry, which is to say, a triumph of producing: all the elements – all the contributions so carefully assembled by Korda – cohere perfectly in Reed’s masterly hands. Guy Hamilton has described how ruthless Reed was in the editing process: superb sequences that would have made another man’s career were extirpated without a second’s thought. They didn’t serve the whole, dissipated tension where it was most required, and distracted attention from the main thrust of the narrative. And Reed knew exactly what he was doing when he accepted Welles’s rewrite of the end of the Great Wheel scene. If he hadn’t thought it worked, he would have cut it. ‘It was Carol’s film, Peter,’ Welles told Bogdanovich, ‘ – and Korda’s.’ This was certainly true. After a dreadful run of flaccid and insipid flops since the end of the war, Korda desperately needed this film to be a success, but the way to ensure that, as he never ceased to remind Selznick, was to enable Reed to make the film he wanted to make. It was, as it happens, the last time he and Welles attempted to work together, which is a great shame: if Welles could have worked with any producer, surely it would have been Korda. But Korda had evidently had enough; after The Third Man he sold Welles’s contract on to the British hack film-maker Herbert Wilcox, for whom Welles appeared in two resoundingly dull potboilers.
The Third Man, it is hard not to feel, is exactly the sort of film that Welles should have been making. It is so Wellesian, in fact, that there is a widespread belief that he was somehow responsible for it, even if only by osmosis. That this was not so has been amply demonstrated here and elsewhere, though Welles himself – despite his ringing endorsement to Bogdanovich of Reed’s authorship of the film (as opposed to the screenplay) – was sometimes unable to resist fuelling the suspicion, most notably in his 1958 interview in Cahiers du Cinéma. The interviewers, André Bazin and Charles Bitsch, told him that they felt there were sequences in the film that he had directed himself, for instance the one in front of the Great Wheel. ‘“Direct” is a word I must explain,’ says Welles, with masterly ambiguity. ‘The whole question is who takes the initiative. First of all I don’t want to look as though I’m upstaging Carol Reed; secondly, he is incontestably a very competent director; thirdly he has in common with me that if someone has a good idea, he lets them get on with it; he likes to see something inspired happening, and doesn’t try to put it down because it’s not his, as too many little film directors do. But it’s tricky to say anything about this film, because I’ve been very discreet, and I don’t want now . . .’ At which point he went on to claim that he had written the whole of Harry’s dialogue.
He later felt ashamed of what he had so publicly implied, and retracted it. But in the late 1960s he was not above telling the young British actor Jonathan Lynn that when they fell behind schedule on the film, Carol Reed had given him a camera and asked him to direct some second-unit scenes, ‘including the memorable scene where the cat finds Harry Lime hiding in a doorway’.3 It was hard for Welles – humiliating, in fact – to have been part of something brilliant for which he was not responsible. He was Orson Welles, after all, Welles the wunderkind, the quadruple threat: how could he simply have given a very good performance? The point is that what Welles gave to the film is infinitely more than any rewrite, or any purported second-unit work: he gave of himself, which he was very rarely to do in his work as an actor in other men’s films. And he was duly rewarded with a success unlike any he had ever experienced, or ever would again, to the extent that his identification with the part became positively irksome, though not without its advantages. It is a glimpse of the very different acting career he might have had, had he chosen ever to trust a director again.
After Welles finished his brief stint on The Third Man, he went back to Italy to start spending his $100,000 salary on resuming Othello – or, rather, on starting it all over again. He had shot 3,000 metres of film, nearly two hours’ worth; now he dumped it all. Meanwhile, due to pressure from critics, Kane finally went on delayed general release in Italy, truncated and re-edited. This was RKO’s delayed revenge on Welles for the detested final-cut clause in his original contract with them; when the Italian critics protested about the recutting, RKO had replied, in an official statement: ‘The less films of this sort that are seen, the better: they ruin the public’s taste.’ Back in America, disastrous reviews of Macbeth prompted Republic to recut that, too. Regardless, Welles ploughed on with Othello; what else could he do? His immediate priority was to find an Iago, and to that end he approached his old friend Hilton Edwards, co-director of the Gate Theatre in Dublin, where in 1930 the sixteen-year-old Welles had had his start in the theatre, to persuade Micheál MacLiammóir – Edwards’s partner in life and professionally, the Gate’s leading actor and chief designer, as well as a playwright and memoirist of some brilliance – to play the part.
MacLiammóir needed persuading because he had not acted on screen since 1916, when he was a boy actor and film was an altogether different medium, and because he was unconvinced that the camera would be able to cope with what he knew to be his quintessentially theatrical persona. He also had doubts as to whether he was well cast as Iago; he was after all, was he not, an acteur noble, a famous Hamlet and before that a Romeo to set hearts a-flutter? Could he really, he wondered, play a villain? Welles called him, to apply a little light pressure. ‘Voice not changed at all,’ wrote MacLiammóir in his diary.
He said the same of me: we expressed emotion and revived memories of last farewell on quay-side at New York fifteen years ago. Said I was very ill; he said the trip and the sight of him would cure me. Said I was very old; he said so was he. (Forgot to point out that Othello was supposed to be.) Said I’d never played Iago, he said he’d never played Othello. Said I had put on weight; he said so had he, and that we’d be two Chubby Tragedians together and that he was going right out to buy yards of cheese-cloth. Said I didn’t think I’d be any good on movies; he said I was born for them. (Good God!) Said I didn’t see myself as villain, he said unmentionable word and that I was patently villainous in all eyes but my own and Hilton’s. All this confusing but intriguing. Finally rang off and turned to H. saying I didn’t think I could go.4
But of course he did. Not many people could resist Welles in this vein. For the next year, in the vivid, shrewd and remarkably candid diary he scrupulously kept, from the first day of filming to the last, MacLiammóir observed Welles and the progress of Othello from the perspective of a newcomer to the art of film-making. Simultaneously boggle- and lynx-eyed, he witnessed the madness all around him with a sort of appalled fascination; he was not to know that the shoot of Othello was like no other shoot in the history of the cinema. He was mesmerised by Welles; in MacLiammóir’s wicked and often surreal pages, he emerges as five times larger than life and several times stranger. ‘There was Orson in the doorway,’ he writes of his arrival in Paris, glimpsing Welles for the first time since 1934, ‘huge, expansive, round-headed, almond-eyed, clad apparently in dungarees, and miraculously unchanged . . . no bridging of the years seemed necessary: exactly as he used to be, perhaps larger and more, as it were, tropically Byzantine still, but essentially the same old darkly waltzing tree, half banyan, half oak, the Jungle and the Forest lazily pawing each other for mastery’.5
Welles had called MacLiammóir in late January of 1949, a few days after he had finished filming in The Third Man. He summoned him to Paris, where they rehearsed in various hotel rooms, perhaps not too strenuously – ‘rehearsing and eating’, one entry records – but rehearsals in film, however informal, are always worth their weight in gold. MacLiammóir and Welles were in agreement about the characters: ‘no single trace of the Mephistophelean Iago is to be used,’ wrote MacLiammóir, ‘no
conscious villainy; a common man, clever as a wagonload of monkeys, his thought never on the present moment but always on the move after the move after next: a business man dealing in destruction with neatness, method, and a proper pleasure in his work: the honest honest Iago reputation is accepted because it has become almost the truth . . .’ Sexual dysfunction, as Welles saw it, was Iago’s underlying motive: ‘the immemorial hatred of life, the secret isolation of impotence under the soldier’s muscles, the flabby solitude gnawing at the groins, the eye’s untiring calculation’. Welles had no truck with the Christian, or perhaps more precisely the Catholic, notion of unmotivated malignancy, of diabolic negativity: it was the banality of evil that interested him in Iago. ‘Any tendency to passion,’ recorded MacLiammóir, ‘even the expression of the onlookers’ delight at the spectacle of disaster, makes for open villainy and must be crushed.’ When Iago is explaining to Desdemona’s gormless would-be suitor Roderigo how he will dispose of his supposed rival Cassio, he says: ‘Why, by making him uncapable of his place . . .’ Roderigo looks blank, and Iago, according to Welles – ‘as though explaining to a child why it should brush its teeth,’ as MacLiammóir puts it – adds, with a pleasant smile, ‘Knocking out his brains’.
MacLiammóir’s account of these rehearsals is one of the few records we have of Welles’s work on a text with an actor, and it is interesting to see how detailed Welles’s view of the characters and their relationship was, complex and full of psychological detail. But as always with him, his thoughts were crystallising into visual imagery: even in these preliminary rehearsals he spoke of ‘the growing dependence of Othello on Iago’s presence, the merging of the two men into one murderous image like a pattern of loving shadows welded’. It is further interesting to note that MacLiammóir describes Welles, before they had ever stood in front of the cameras, delivering the lines ‘with a queer breathless rapidity: this treatment, with his great bulk and power, gives an extraordinary feeling of loss, of withering, diminishing, crumbling, toppling over, of a vanishing equilibrium; quite wonderful’. MacLiammóir wondered whether this was a conscious rejection by Welles of the approach he had used in Macbeth, ‘letting us have the stuff from the wild lungs and in the manner intended’, reflecting that ‘people didn’t like it, a verdict possibly shared by the camera, so there maybe is the answer’.
They were soon joined at rehearsals by Lea Padovani. She was ‘fascinating’, said MacLiammóir, ‘and doesn’t seem to like Desdemona at all’. A few days later she was sacked, and was back on the plane to Rome. This eruption had been a long time coming. Padovani had at last pushed Welles too far, and their relationship ended, she told Welles’s biographer Charles Higham, in a spectacularly physical fight in which she finally knocked him out with a doorstop. Rita Ribolla, in her diary of events, reports a much chillier, much bleaker account of the break-up, which evidently took place not in Rome, but in Paris, where at four o’clock in the morning Welles woke Ribolla, bursting into her hotel room with a bunch of bedraggled flowers and the news that the engagement with Lea was off. ‘She made a terrible scene,’ Ribolla reports Welles as saying. ‘Very dramatic.’
‘What did she say?’ ‘That she preferred to live in a furnished room and eat spaghetti for the rest of her life than become Mrs Welles.’ ‘What did you say?’ ‘I wired you to come.’ ‘What are you going to do now?’ ‘I had you come over to tell me that.’ ‘I?’ ‘Of course, who else?’ ‘Do you still love her?’ ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’ ‘Do you want to try and persuade her to change her mind?’ ‘No, No. No!’ ‘You’ll wake up the entire hotel.’ ‘Why, is anyone asleep?’ ‘It’s 4.40 in the morning.’ ‘Is it really?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Then I suppose you want to go to bed, so I’d better go to the Bois.’ ‘The Bois?’ ‘Yes, where else can I find a bench to lay down on with my misery?’6
Ribolla asked what Welles wanted her to do with Lea.
‘Get her out on the first plane back to Rome.’ I called downstairs for a taxi and threw a coat over my shoulders. ‘Shall we go?’ I asked. He heaved himself out of the chair, up from the remnants of what once had been flowers. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘How did this happen?’ I was tactful enough not to say anything. He picked them up and tried to squeeze them back into form, mumbling that they’d been so pretty, he’d gone into such trouble to find an open shop in the middle of the night, he’d hoped to give me a little pleasure with them.
She checked Welles into the George V under her own name, then called Padovani the following morning at the Ritz, where she and Welles had been staying in interlocking rooms, to make arrangements for the flight. Padovani was dressed and packed when Ribolla arrived, and immediately demanded that the communicating door between her suite and Welles’s be opened.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Don’t just stand there and oh at me,’ the ex-Goddess of Love yelled, losing her attitude of bereavement entirely, ‘Have it opened immediately.’ She stamped her pretty slender foot with the force of a Bavarian beer-cart horse and sparks of fire shot from her then quite suddenly switched back to mournful widowhood and mumbled that I should please have it opened. I asked her why. She said that her jewels were in his room.
Eventually the jewels were recovered, and she departed with them. True to form, Welles immediately accused Ribolla of stealing them, but she was able to send him a clip from a Roman newspaper showing Padovani arriving at the airport with all her bijouterie in full view. ‘In the nine months I was with her,’ Welles said to a journalist some years afterwards, ‘I paid for everything I’d done to women for twenty years.’ In later years he spoke of her, sometimes affectionately, sometimes disparagingly, but it appears that it was the most intense amatory relationship of his life to that date – the first time he had met serious resistance, the first time he had been deeply wounded. Women did not get a very good report from Welles for many years thereafter.
His broken heart was the least of his worries. He now had no Desdemona. Meanwhile, Padovani’s lover, Giorgio Papi, remained on board as production manager, despite having had his bag, containing contracts and 4 million lire in cash, stolen from him in a department store. Contracts were unlovely things to Welles, so he may have thought their disappearance good riddance, but the 4 million lire would certainly have come in handy. Papi was exceptionally good at his job, however, and, painful as the associations might be, Welles retained him to the very end of the shoot. He was determined to press on with the film, but the loss of his Desdemona demanded considerable rethinking; it may also be that, quite apart from the emotional distress he was enduring at Padovani’s hands, Welles had finally realised that her English would never be up to Shakespeare’s verse. So began the Quest for Desdemona, which continued for some weeks. ‘Have already seen three put through many of the lines but all wrong,’ wrote MacLiammóir in his diary. ‘Orson developing bloodshot eyes, always with him a sign of worry.’
At one point Cécile Aubry, currently the toast of the French-speaking world in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s acclaimed Manon, accepted the role; they rehearsed briefly, she in an Inspector Clouseau-like accent (‘Why I should fear Ai know nawt, seence guilt-ee-nayss Ai know nawt,’ according to MacLiammóir’s transcript), but within minutes, it seemed, she was off too, to appear in the latest American–Italian co-production blockbuster, The Black Rose. Where to turn now? Welles’s friend Anatole Litvak invited him to see the rough-cut of the film he had just directed, Snakepit, featuring Betsy Blair, a rising actress noted for her fearlessly left-wing views and for her marriage to Gene Kelly. Welles immediately phoned her in Hollywood and offered her Desdemona; without the slightest persuasion, she accepted. ‘His conception was of a modern young woman, a rebel against Venetian society. I’d had a glimmer of this idea myself, so I was thrilled to be on the right track.’7
With Desdemona finally in place, Welles invited Agnes Moorehead to play Emilia (sublime casting); Dick Wilson touchingly reported that, ‘very unhappy about the prospect of playing Emilia to Betsy Blair’s Desdemona�
��, Moorehead had asked instead to be considered for Desdemona herself. Great actress though she unquestionably was, it would have been hard to imagine her as the young beauty who stole Othello’s heart. ‘I took it on myself to turn this suggestion down,’ wrote Wilson, ‘in a nice way, I assure you.’ Casting Emilia was not a high priority. Welles quickly filled most of the other roles from London, including Robert Coote, fresh from Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, as Roderigo; the Irish-born Michael Laurence as Cassio; and, as Lodovico (a typically exotic Wellesian touch), Nicholas Bruce, son of the great Diaghilev ballerina Tamara Karsavina; finally he asked Hilton Edwards to play Desdemona’s father, Brabantio.
Welles’s fathers-in-art, Edwards and MacLiammóir, were now, as a unit, part of the team. Welles’s relationship with the two men was one of some complexity, and the season he had mounted when he was nineteen at his old school in Woodstock, Illinois, with them as guest stars (MacLiammóir played Hamlet and Edwards Tsar Paul I), had further complicated it when they found themselves to be bit-part players in what seemed to them to be a festival mounted to the greater glory of Orson Welles. That was 1934; the three men had since been in touch by mail, though Welles was not best pleased with either Edwards’s telegram congratulating him on his performance ‘as Count Dracula’ in Jane Eyre or MacLiammóir’s 1946 autobiography, All for Hecuba, which told a rather different story about Welles’s early break at the Gate Theatre from the one Welles himself had been telling. But he never ceased to acknowledge their importance in his life and work, the poetic intensity of MacLiammóir’s acting and his peerless command of language, as well as Edwards’s mastery of stagecraft, more particularly the radical use of light by which Welles had been so profoundly influenced. For their part, they were glad of the money: the Gate had had a troubled existence for some time and they were personally on their uppers. Moreover, Edwards was keen to learn about film. MacLiammóir had had tea with the ancient Madame Maud Gonne MacBride, Yeats’s great legendary love, and she had vatically enjoined him to find out how to make films ‘for Ireland’. Welles’s Othello may not have been the best training ground.