by Simon Callow
MacLiammóir – unlike many of his colleagues – had in his possession the thing Welles least liked anyone to have: a contract. It confirmed that he was to be paid 1.5 million French francs, to cover three weeks rehearsal and ten weeks shooting. The document prudently stipulated that ‘for any further work over and above this period, the artist shall receive payment pro rata’; all expenses were also to be paid. In time, this document came to seem like nothing but a cruel mockery. Meanwhile the great adventure commenced. Or nearly. Just as shooting was about to begin, everything stopped, again. Welles had run out of money, and he agreed to appear, for his now statutory fee of $100,000, in yet another American–Italian blockbuster, the same one, in fact, for which Cécile Aubry had deserted Othello: The Black Rose, in which she played the title-role of a fourteenth-century virgin; Welles gave his Mongol warlord, Bayan of the Hundred Eyes – no acting required, if we are to believe Harriet White Medin’s description of his behaviour in the Casal Pilozzo, just an enjoyable dip into the make-up box. Copper-coloured, with puffy eyes, he languidly exhales the dialogue, the character’s mind apparently elsewhere. This may have had something to do with his own preoccupation with finding suitable locations for Othello. The Black Rose was shooting in Morocco; when Trauner heard this, he urged Welles to take a detour to Mogador, a little down the coast from inland Meknes, where he was then shooting, as a likely site for the many scenes set in Cyprus – the bulk of the play, in fact, so it was a crucial location. Welles found Mogador perfect beyond his wildest imaginings, with its fortress, its ocean, its starkness and the almost complete absence of the modern world. First occupied by the British – Drake had Christmas lunch there in 1577 – then by the Berbers and lastly by the French, Mogador lost its purpose when the port was shifted to Casablanca; the arrival of the Othello film crew was, says Nicholas Shakespeare in his essay on the town, ‘more or less the last occasion anything happened in Mogador’.8
Just before it did – like a distant hubbub from another planet – the New York Times brought news of Senator Jack Tenney’s State Senate Committee on Un-American Activities Report, which listed individuals ‘who followed or appeased some of the Communist Party line program over a long period of time’. The list included Charlie Chaplin, Frank Sinatra, Thomas Mann, Dashiell Hammett, Danny Kaye, Maurice Chevalier, Henry Wallace and Orson Welles. Most of those on the list responded: Sinatra said that ‘this statement is the product of liars, and liars to me make very un-American leaders’. ‘I don’t know what they’re talking about,’ said the great bandleader Artie Shaw. ‘I don’t think they do either.’ Katharine Hepburn ‘refused to dignify Mr Tenney’s un-American accusation with a reply’.9 There was no response at all from Welles. Perhaps he didn’t know that he was even on the list. Perhaps, obsessed by trying to film his seventeenth-century story of the corrosive effects of jealousy, he no longer cared.
Welles had assembled the crew for Othello largely from the Italian–American films in which he had recently acted: Washinsky, the first assistant director, as we have seen, he met on Black Magic; the director of photography, with whom he had also worked on Black Magic in his dual capacity as star and unofficial director, was the great Anchise Brizzi, who had shot the Italian film that Welles admired above all others, Shoe-Shine. Brizzi’s associate was Alberto Fusi, who had filmed the sequences in Venice with Padovani the previous year; their junior was Oberdan Troiani, at the very beginning of his career. Giorgio Papi, also from Black Magic, though still nominally production manager, had decided that Morocco was not for him (apart from anything else, his mistress, Padovani, wasn’t there). So Welles had hired, seemingly at random, an American called Cunningham, who was the inventor of a type of magnetic recording tape, the possibilities of which of course thrilled Welles, but whose qualifications for getting permits, arranging transportation and so on were non-existent; in the end, even the magnetic tape turned out not to have worked, leaving then without so much as a guide track for the footage. Trauner arranged for a Frenchman, Julien Derode (who would later go on to coproduce The Day of the Jackal and Julia), to take charge of the day-to-day running of the production, which he did, with more or less cooperation from Welles and the rest of the crew. Welles had also summoned another colleague from an earlier time, the Hungarian cameraman George Fanto, with whom he had shot the superb Jangadeiros section of his aborted film It’s All True in Brazil. ‘ARE YOU AVAILABLE TO FLY IMMEDIATELY CASABLANCA,’ came the telegram. ‘REPLY HOTEL DE PARIS, MOGADOR.’10 Fanto, who had been in Rio making educational programmes for a series called Native Brazilians, was on the next flight out.
He arrived at the same time as MacLiammóir, Hilton Edwards, Betsy Blair and Robert Coote; dinner was already under way at the Hotel de Paris. ‘Squeezed together at one long table in the dining room’, wrote Fanto, ‘were the cast, the technicians, French and Moroccan dignitaries, members of the international press, Shakespearean scholars. They wore costumes, kaftans, uniforms, suits and leisurewear.’ This was paradise for Welles; back to the palmy days of It’s All True: immersion in another culture, another world. ‘The table was loaded with African lobster, lamb stew with couscous, lots of wine and only water for the Moroccans. Everybody competed for Welles’s attention. He could and did deal with all, sitting at the head of the table . . . nothing escaped Welles’s attention as he was endowed with a perception which was a combination of antenna, radar and computer.’11 He spotted MacLiammóir, and ‘rose thunderously from hordes of tumultuous diners and swept towards me waving his napkin like a flag and crying, “Welcome, welcome, dearest Micheál!” Then, folding me in bear-like embrace, stopped dead suddenly to say “Hey! what have you been doing? You’ve put on about six pounds. God dammit, I engaged you to play Iago and here you come Waddling In To Do It!”’ Thus publicly shamed, MacLiammóir picked guiltily at his supper, after which Welles took him on a tour of the moonlit fortress town. ‘Pacing up and down under the moon, I learned of his endless difficulties about money, Italian wardrobe, and cost of labour: everything as I see it is against him before he starts, but his courage, like everything else about him, imagination, egotism, generosity, ruthlessness, forbearance, impatience, sensitivity, grossness and vision, is magnificently out of proportion. His position at the moment is grotesque in its lack of stability and even likelihood, but he will win through and all at the end will fall into his hands, the bright-winged old gorilla.’12 MacLiammóir’s confidence was to be sorely tried.
It is no accident that the published version of his diary is entitled (quoting from Iago’s advice to Roderigo) Put Money in Thy Purse. Money was at the core of their problems, from beginning to end. Welles was now on his own: Scalera had pulled out of their co-production. The Italians would simply distribute. ‘The film’, said a press release, ‘will be produced by Mr Welles at his own expense,’13 as chilling a phrase as can be imagined. It is hard to think of any major director who is not independently wealthy or has a studio of their own who had ever contemplated such a thing. The reality kicked in immediately. On the very first day of rehearsals, 10 June, the entire male wardrobe, ordered from the house of Peruzzi in Florence, failed to appear because of non-payment of bills. Betsy Blair was in the production office when Welles and Trauner arrived in some agitation. ‘Orson pleaded on the phone to Florence; he shouted and threatened and appealed in the name of Art, civilized values, and future work. It was to no avail. If there was no cash on the table, no costumes would be on the plane. And there was no cash.’14
The first scheduled scene was the murder of Roderigo, which Welles had planned to shoot in the street. There seemed no way forward; even the improvised costumes were not yet ready. After sketching in silence for a while, Trauner, says Betsy Blair, quietly suggested that they shoot the scene in a Turkish bath, with the actors in towels. ‘Orson roared with joy,’ says Blair. ‘He threw his arms around Trauner, picked him up, and danced from table to table.’ MacLiammóir reports it differently: Welles had the inspiration himself during a slee
pless night. It seems, in fact, that Trauner had already designed a Turkish bath months earlier, shrewdly supposing that there would be a use for one. It’s possible that Welles chose to make it seem as if they were at a complete impasse (though the absence of nearly all the male principals’ costumes constitutes a very real impasse) in order to pull a brilliant solution out of the hat, instilling the principle of improvisation in the minds of his cast and crew; either way, the scene as shot has a fantastic sense of sprezzatura, a freshness and a sense of being made up as it goes along, which is everything Welles wanted in a film. And this extemporising spirit is what he sought above all else in his collaborators.
Fanto described Trauner as ‘a wizard when it came to executing ideas which Welles came up with under stress’. He found a perfect location for the Turkish bath, under the rampart of the fortress that was used by the locals as a fish-market, and he rapidly transformed it, to great visual effect. ‘It was a place with vaults on two levels,’ said Trauner. ‘I just needed to install some gratings. We had no smoke machines, so we used incense. As you can imagine, the mingled fumes of incense and fish were rather striking.’ As usual, Welles demonstrated what he wanted by making sketches. His drawings, said Trauner, showed his very good visual sense. ‘He never denied the decorative aspect, but he stripped it down. He was one of the first to strip characters . . . his visions were a painter’s visions. Like Eisenstein’s.’15 In the absence of the costumes from Rome, Trauner got the Jewish tailors of Mogador to run them up from whatever materials they had to hand. They made fake armour with sardine cans, while the local tannery made shoes, jerkins and uniforms. The simple, homespun character of the clothes thus conjured up proved to be an improvement over what had been envisaged by Trauner and Welles. ‘When we needed a chain for Desdemona’s handbag,’ Trauner said, ‘I liberated the toilet chains from the hotel, which did the trick perfectly.’ When the money was at last released, the costumes arrived from Italy, embroidered and brocaded. ‘We gave them to the extras; otherwise they would have clashed with the simplicity of the local materials.’16 Mogador was doing very well out of the film: ‘the whole town mucked in as extras,’ reported Nicholas Shakespeare, ‘each person rewarded with a daily ration of two dirhams, a tin of sardines, some Coca-Cola and some bread’.
Welles was now quite literally making it up as he went along, responding to the environment, constantly looking for ways of intensifying the drama by visual means; the text, he felt, would look after itself, at least as long as he and MacLiammóir were speaking it. MacLiammóir was astonished at the frenzy of the process, as well he might have been. Not since the early days of cinema – when Abel Gance would hike up the adrenalin levels by firing pistols into the air over the actors’ heads – had a director been so mercurial, so personally involved in the physical process of filming. The extremely lively sequence in which Cassio gets drunk turned, according to MacLiammóir, ‘into a real Orgy’ because Washinsky, out-Wellesing Welles, let loose a few barrels of red wine among hordes of Jewish extras:
The Arabs stuck to Coca-Cola . . . Hilton, nothing loath to help in this sort of scene, rushed up and down on one side of the harbour armed with a stout stick and yelling directions in English with some scattered but vivacious ejaculations in French, with Washinsky on the other side screaming in any language that came into his head. Orson stood on a rickety pile of boxes and stood behind the camera yelling in American and Italian . . . as Bob, Michael and I dashed about among the crowd bawling what we could of Shakespeare’s lines and being slapped, pinched and pushed and winked at by now totally inebriated Israelite soldiers.17
Welles seemed to have no predetermined plan and rarely completed a scene, preferring to shoot fragments – ‘pieces of a puzzle’, in the words of Jean-Pierre Berthomé, ‘to which only he had the answer’.18 He never actually appeared in front of the camera himself unless it was unavoidable. He was understandably preoccupied with all the other elements for which he was responsible, but in addition he was nervous of acting with his fellow-actors, or even committing to a performance; nonetheless he appeared on the set in full make-up. At the end of every day, Troiani, the assistant cameraman, had a blacker face than Welles, because whenever Welles peered through the viewfinder to see a new set-up, he left his make-up on it.
The crew were shooting on an old-style heavy Mitchell News Camera. ‘It took a quarter of an hour to get the thing right,’ reported Troiani, ‘because Welles would maybe want a tower in the distance to be seen between two strands of hair. The actor had to be absolutely motionless.’19 Then one of the new Caméflex cameras arrived: Welles was among the first to use it; the delighted manufacturer, Éclair, sent someone to photograph him doing so. Introduced just two years earlier, it was a shoulder-held portable 35mm camera with instant-change magazines, and it offered Welles exactly the freedom he craved; now he could follow his impulses. The director of photography, Anchise Brizzi – patrician and classical, impeccable in his three-piece suit in the midday Moroccan sun – loathed Welles’s way of working, as did his associate Fusi. Troiani reports that Welles would ask Brizzi if the shot was okay. ‘It’s okay,’ he would reply, ‘though to my way of thinking . . . ’ ‘I’ll shoot the whole goddam movie again if I have to,’ Welles used to retort, ‘just tell me was it good or not?’20
Eventually the two cameramen had had enough and walked out. Papi advised Troiani that if he followed suit, he’d end up at the bottom of the ocean, which was persuasive enough to make him stay, but only as assistant cameraman. Troiani concluded that being Welles’s director of photography would be a nightmare, but he loved the way Welles worked, constantly building shots to create an effect on the viewer – unlike Visconti, for example, who, as far as Troiani was concerned, had ‘no conception of cinema at all; it was just filmed theatre’. After Othello, Troiani had no time for anyone but Welles in fact: ‘for me, if they didn’t live up to Welles, they were nobody’.21 Trauner described the atmosphere of the shoot as ‘rather Elizabethan – perhaps more Elizabethan than the film itself’.
They had all been living in their hotel in the nearby city of Safi for some three or four weeks; no bills had been paid, so, there was only one thing for it, wrote George Fanto: ‘you have to show that you’re not poor so you order more and more extravagant dishes’. This was a perfectly Hungarian modus operandi, one that Alexander Korda had used all his life. Fanto’s very rich mother had come to stay in the hotel, and she kept the staff sweet with tips, cigarettes and expensive confectionery. ‘We were a small team during filming,’ wrote Fanto. ‘We had unending discussions from dusk to dawn, flung ourselves into major philosophical debates with Orson who suffered from insomnia. These conversations would go on till 3 in the morning and resume at 6. Between us – with MacLiammóir and Hilton – we had plenty of things to fight about. Very lively it was, very animated.’22 It is notable that of the cinematographers, only Fanto was part of this lively band.
Before he walked out, Brizzi had shot tests on Betsy Blair; she was asked simply to speak the phrase ‘Welcome, My Lord Othello, to Cyprus’ a number of times over the course of two days’ shooting on the ramparts. She was having a splendid time in Mogador and adored sitting with everyone in the evenings, listening while Welles regaled them with his visions of Othello and projects to come – among them what sounds like a rather enticing musical version of The Tempest with Louis Armstrong as Caliban. Then suddenly filming stopped and Welles disappeared. Blair got a note that she was to pack without telling anyone; Welles would be waiting for her in a hotel in Casablanca. He received her in his bed in huge white silk pyjamas and vividly described how dire the financial circumstances were. ‘Any disappointment I might have felt was dissolved in sympathy for him. He said he knew I’d want to get back to Gene and Kerry and not hang around Rome while he scrabbled for finance. As soon as it was in place, he’d summon me back.’ He was very excited, he said, about their ‘characterization’. He’d keep her posted at all times. Oh, and by the way
, could she buy her own ticket back to LA? It would be reimbursed, of course.23 Of course it wasn’t: and of course she never heard from him again. Welles had decided, he told MacLiammóir, that Blair was ‘too modern’ – the very reason he had cast her. Clearly he had no easy answer to the crucial question of what kind of a woman Desdemona was; no doubt his recent experience with Lea Padovani had deeply confused his view. The rest of the cast were told she had been sent on holiday to Paris. In due course Fanto, who had taken on some of the tasks of the production manager, wrote to Blair to tell her the truth, explaining that Welles was only trying to serve the film, and Shakespeare. Some time later he got a reply from her: ‘I am no longer angry with Orson,’ she wrote. ‘I don’t think he’s a bastard, as a matter of fact I quite agree with you.’24
Filming had not of course closed down; it continued, after a fashion, as Welles publicly pondered how to shoot the film. ‘Orson beautifully dressed up and painted a dark chocolate brown,’ noted MacLiammóir: