by Simon Callow
paced to and fro for hours thinking it all out on the edge of the farthest watch tower, among a thicket of cannons and anxious shivering technicians, black rocks and leaping waves below, and a tempest howling overhead. Finally with warnings frantically hissed and shrieked at us by everyone, we assume stout leather belts to which ropes are attached, and held fast by Marc, Pierrot and other members of the French crew (Arabs being considered too emotional for the job) hang at right angles from the battlements in order to play the scene, camera at dizzy levels conveying sense of terror and (not wholly unfounded) feeling of physical danger . . . as neither of us could hear the other speak and as we were both continually engaged in pulling portions of our clothes out of our mouths whither the wild winds had tossed them, intimate and rather spicy information proffered by Iago was difficult.25
At least Welles no longer had to carry in his head the whole of what he had shot: the film finally had a continuity supervisor, known as Gouzy. They also had an Emilia, Fay Compton; had it not been for the lack of a Desdemona – details, details – they would have had a full cast. Compton was a very distinguished British actress, with a famously vivacious private life, noted for her classical work and not without experience in film; she had appeared with some success for Carol Reed in Odd Man Out. She arrived in Safi full of trepidation, having taken the job against the advice of her agent; London was awash with rumours about the production and, sure enough, on arrival at the hotel she found a gang of actors on the brink of mutiny. Someone immediately showed her a clipping in a French newspaper reporting that Welles had no money, and that the film would never be made. Certain that the experience would be, at the very least, interesting, she too decided to keep a diary. Called to Mogador the following day, she met Welles, ‘who seems really pleased to meet me’, she confided in her diary. She had drinks with MacLiammóir and Edwards and was driven back to Safi with them in Welles’s car, swigging from MacLiammóir’s bottle of brandy. ‘Much laughter and many stories told.’ There were more drinks, then more.
The next day Compton started filming – the handkerchief scene – and, back in the hotel, she seized the opportunity to press her contract into Welles’s hand; thus cornered, he then ‘got off’, she told dear diary, ‘with French tootsie actress in hotel’. In his absence, she settled in for her first proper gossip with the actors, discovering that they and the crew had only got any money at all because they refused to move from Rome until they were paid. MacLiammóir had received nothing, having being offered a slice of the film instead, which he didn’t want. ‘And rightly too. It may never be finished or shown.’ Compton concluded that ‘Orson has apparently mucked everything up.’ The following day they shot more of the handkerchief scene, and later, at supper, where he joined them after he had, again, ‘dallied with his tootsie’, she found herself falling under his spell. ‘An overwhelming personality with a capital E ego. Incredible energy and vitality . . . as a director is very patient, very helpful . . . as he says, to be good in films, you must not so much act as think . . . very much the same as Carol’s method.’26
Three days later, just as she was getting into her stride, the production was suddenly closed down and the camera crew released, with the expectation of further shooting in three weeks’ time in Venice. Welles, MacLiammóir and Edwards all fell ill with bronchitic ailments. Fay Compton told her diary that she hoped the film would be made, ‘if only to stop the “I told you so”s’. Orson, she said, was ‘a Great Titan against The World’27 (which, she added, not unperceptively, was how he saw himself). MacLiammóir and Edwards found themselves back in Paris – ‘habitual feeling of having never left Paris descends’ – and were introduced by Julien Derode to the new Desdemona, the French-Canadian actress Suzanne Cloutier, whom Welles had seen in Duvivier’s Au Royaume des Cieux; she had also just acted in Marcel Carné’s Juliette, as yet unreleased. ‘Feel sure’, wrote MacLiammóir, ‘somewhere in her There is Steel. Interesting; I smell Ham, Character, Individuality, and above all, Indestructible Will, and prophesy that Orson will have trouble with her (as she no doubt with him).’28 MacLiammóir’s prophetic soul did not deceive him.
CHAPTER THREE
Der Dritter Mann Persönlich
FAY COMPTON returned to London, where gossip about the film was raging more fiercely than ever. Robert Coote had gone to Rome, whence he telegraphed her: ‘DARLING PLEASE DO NOT COME HERE. IT’S EVER SO NASTY’ and followed it up with a postcard saying, ‘they have no news, no money, drinks, gals, clothes or future. What is happening?’1 He sent Welles a cable asking whether the film had been abandoned. Lee Cresell sent Compton a card saying that not a shot of film had been done and that everyone was in the usual state of nervous collapse. Her agent told her that the whole thing was ‘a washout’. Then suddenly, at a day’s notice, she was summoned, and made the difficult journey from Northolt via Milan and thence to Venice by train.
There was no one to meet her. Compton got to the Europa Hotel, where she had been told to find Welles, but he was not in; she tried calling MacLiammóir, at which point Welles arrived, astonished that she was there, but delighted. Flowing over with bonhomie, he gave her his room overlooking the Grand Canal; he, MacLiammóir and Edwards then took her to Harry’s Bar. From there they all took a gondola back to the hotel, but Welles got off at a nightclub, ‘where he is meeting some Tootsie, I imagine,’ she steamily informed her diary. The following day was less agreeable. They all met for dinner, along with Suzanne Cloutier, Nicholas Bruce and Robert Coote, who moaned about his hotel room. Welles – ‘nervy and depressed’ – attacked Coote for his constant grumbling, then turned on MacLiammóir for being late and not apologising, and for slacking throughout the day. Edwards arrived and pitched in. Such was the mood among the actors in Venice, in August 1949. ‘Oh dear!’ sighs Compton to her journal.2
Anchise Brizzi having departed with Alberto Fusi, G.R. Aldo took over as cinematographer for the Venice shoot. He had been director of photography on Visconti’s masterpiece La Terra Trema; no doubt Welles refrained from mentioning that he had walked out of the film in disgust when he saw it at the Venice Festival two years earlier. Aldo shared the position of director of photography with Alvaro Mancori, the assistant cameraman on Black Magic and an Othello veteran: he had shot some of the Venetian sequences a year earlier. Aldo didn’t last long this time round: once, according to Mancori, he told Welles that a shot he proposed wouldn’t work. ‘Shoot the picture,’ roared Welles. ‘I’ll worry about what works and what doesn’t. Nothing’s impossible. I’ll cut it if it doesn’t work out.’ Shortly afterwards Aldo departed. Mancori was careful not to make the same mistake. He observed Welles closely. ‘Welles had a terrible character. Frightening if riled. A bully. If he bellowed at you, he did no more than that. But if he was quiet . . . watch out. A strange animal indeed.’ He came to respect Welles nonetheless, despite his being, as Mancori put it, ‘full of little manias’, which included always blaming someone else: the actors, the crew or, as often as not, the cameraman.
With what Mancori described as his 360-degree vision, Welles missed nothing.3 As an actor, he was always conscious of his exact position. In one shot that involved the old-fashioned Parvo Debrie camera, he could catch sight of himself in a mirror that lit up when the lens changed; while he was acting he would check in the mirror to see whether his framing was right. He didn’t hesitate to make the operators repeat camera moves over and over again, which drove them mad, but he knew exactly what he wanted. His ingenuity was limitless: ‘lances held aloft by an array of soldiers were small splinters in thimbles on each finger of a hand,’ writes Alberto Anile in his indispensable Orson Welles in Italy. ‘A sheet flapping next to a basin of water was a sail on the Mediterranean sea.’ At such moments Welles rediscovered his childlike delight in the medium, reminding himself that it was, as he had so memorably remarked when he first went to RKO, ‘the best electric train set a boy ever had’.
As only an Italian perhaps would, Manc
ori even grudgingly admired Welles’s outlandishly capricious behaviour on the set, because he carried it off with such flourish. He would call the entire crew and actors for nine in the morning, and then show up at six in the evening surrounded by pretty women and a chap playing the accordion. ‘What can you do with a man like that?’ asked Mancori plaintively. It takes a nearly superhuman level of chutzpah to behave in this fashion on a film set, which at the best of times is a seething mass of resentments and mutinies waiting to happen. It is a gauntlet thrown down, an explicit assertion of personal status, which says: ‘Defy me if you dare.’ It is behaviour designed to provoke. And provocation was one of Welles’s central strategies – a technique, in fact. ‘If everything’s going well,’ said Trauner, ‘you can rely on him to come up with something that throws everything into doubt. It’s subconscious.’4 It is a tactic that breeds adrenalin and counteracts complacency; it was deeply embedded in Welles’s temperament.
On Othello the particular target of this approach was Suzanne Cloutier. It has been suggested (by her, among others) that Welles wanted to have sex with her, and that his subsequent behaviour towards her was an extended punishment for her having rejected of him. Welles was perfectly capable of behaving in that way, but it seems that with Cloutier it was less to do with sex than with a fundamental temperamental hostility. As MacLiammóir has indicated, she was at core made of steel, despite the little black rag doll that accompanied her everywhere and her unceasing attempts at artless girlishness. MacLiammóir’s reproduction of her conversation gives a vivid sense of what it was about her that enraged Welles: ‘She had too much heart, that was her secret. She meant psychically speaking in the main, because she was, in the main, a psychical person. Sometimes she didn’t believe she was of this earth at all, especially when her heartbeats made her feel she was nothing more or less than a Bird. All that was purely spiritual. As for physical side, well, her heart was the wonder and despair of every specialist in Paris, to say nothing of Ottawa, Hollywood and other centres of learning.’
Welles instinctively sensed resistance. His methods of breaking Cloutier down were unrelenting, worthy of The Taming of the Shrew. ‘He had the habit of nibbling pumpkin,’ reported Mancori, ‘and he would spit the seeds at her as she was doing her part. He knew what the camera would and wouldn’t pick up. He wanted her to speak perfect Shakespearean English while he spat at her, poor woman.’ MacLiammóir records the battle of wills between them – Welles scornfully dubbed her ‘Schnucks’ – but spares the harsh details revealed by Mancori. On one occasion she was keen to visit her ailing mother in London. Welles refused point-blank. Taking pity on her, Mancori quietly checked the schedule: she was in the clear for a few days. She went. As it happens, Welles went to London too, and one evening chanced to walk into the restaurant in which Cloutier was dining. She burst into tears; he beat his fists on the table and roared at her, ‘I told you not to come! Who told you to come?’ Eventually she admitted it was Mancori. Welles confronted him: ‘You did something that went against my wishes. I had said no because . . . I know why I didn’t want her to go!’5
Cloutier spent a great deal of her time during the film in tears, but Welles never really got to her. She was wrapped up in a cotton-wool ball of her own self-obsession. She and Welles had something in common – they were both fabulists, masters of self-reinvention. When her future husband, Peter Ustinov, first met her, she told him that her mother was a German Jew and that her father was a Native American, neither of which was even remotely true. In later years Cloutier pretended that she and Welles had got on very well, and that they remained close friends; this was not true, though at the very end of filming they had arrived at a kind of truce.
For once Welles, normally violently opposed to spectators on a film set, allowed glamorous visitors to watch while they worked, perhaps thinking he might be able to get some much-needed money out of them: ‘Astonishing figure arrives,’ reported Fay Compton in her diary. ‘Cross between Witch in fairy-tale and one-time telephone cover – turns out to be Diana Duff Cooper with a more than usually offensive staring society group. Their manners are really alarming.’ This was Lady Diana Cooper, the great socialite and one-time heroine of Max Reinhardt’s legendary production of The Miracle. The next visitor was Welles’s co-star and sparring partner from Jane Eyre, Joan Fontaine, and then Joseph Cotten turned up for lunch with Welles, which threw Cloutier into a terrible state: ‘Desdemona tied up with nerves and therefore unable to speak, let alone act,’ noted the relentless Compton. ‘Nervy and touchy as hell over her hair etc. . . .’ Both Cotten and Fontaine (as a page), but not Lady Diana, were slipped into a shot, so successfully disguised that they are invisible in the finished film. The scene they were shooting – four minutes long at the most, shot in the cloister of a Byzantine church – went on endlessly till they ran out of light, whereupon Welles turned it into a night-shoot, but it still wouldn’t come right. It was Death in Venice weather, the heat from the notorious sirocco all but unbearable, causing Hilton Edwards acute distress. ‘Am amazed at Orson’s patience in the face of maddening situations,’ confided Fay Compton to her diary. ‘Also have great respect for him as director and love working for him.’6
A day later, Welles disappeared; it was left to Fanto to tell the actors that the rest of the film would be shot in Rome, at the Scalera Studios, where Trauner had built an elaborate set reproducing parts of Mogador and Venice. Compton had to be back in London to do a play, so she was anxious at the chaos that seemed to have overtaken the film, with very little being shot; in fact what they did mostly was reshooting, because Welles thought what they had was too pretty. Compton’s affection and respect for Welles grew daily: she was exactly the sort of actor Welles loved, a feisty pro, with no grand ideas about herself, but an absolute determination to get it right. ‘Orson has thought of brilliant but devilish way to do villainy speech. I am ashamed to say it took me 25 takes to get it. Orson doesn’t seem to mind.’ She had not yet been paid, but on she went. The following night they shot through a storm. Then it was discovered that the last two intricate shots had been on dud negative. ‘Our half-witted script girl loses the other half and can’t give Orson any of the information he needs as to what is good and what isn’t. Nobody will take blame. Eventually, assistant cameraman, Fusi, is blamed and sacked, and taken back again. Storm raging through all this.’ There was no more film left: the plane bringing fresh supplies had broken down at Cannes. ‘Orson raging – naturally – but still behaving a jolly sight better than most people would.’
The following day Welles told her that he had seen the rushes and that she was ‘sensational’ and that the crew referred to her as la Duse Inglese, after the greatest of all Italian actresses, Eleonora Duse. En passant, Welles confessed to her that he had developed an intense dislike for Suzanne Cloutier. ‘She’s a silly little thing,’ Compton admitted, ‘and selfish and stubborn, but has a nice side to her and I don’t think she deserves such loathing.’ The following day she changed her mind: ‘Last shot of day with Suzanne. Help! Perfectly simple shot but of course she repeatedly muffs it. She’s had all day to learn one line – won’t listen to Orson – combination of stupidity and stubbornness – and dares to say she is tired. Gets told off by Orson – rightly . . . at last we finish and go home. Suzanne in tears in car.’ At the dinner break, Welles went off to Rome on a date and didn’t come back for three hours, leaving the actors and the crew kicking their heels. ‘Naughty,’ writes the doting Miss Compton, more than half-admiringly. Rome was in the grip of a heatwave; the electricity was down in the city and two old generators were blowing hot air into an already stifling studio. When Welles returned to the studio, an electrical storm suddenly blew up; he ordered the cameramen to shoot it: who knows, he said, what use he might not put it to? Finally, at the end of the week, and in good time to get to her rehearsals in London, Compton was discharged, garlanded with praise and presents; it was her birthday. ‘What an extraordinary experience this has
been. Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’7
Two days later, on 19 September 1949, shooting was again suspended. MacLiammóir and Edwards – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Welles’s Hamlet – hung about, as they had done so often since Othello began, in a sort of upholstered limbo, dining and drinking and visiting theatres in Europe’s finest watering holes (Paris, Berlin, Brussels) until next called upon to make an appearance. The call finally came in October, when MacLiammóir was summoned to Viterbo, a little to the north of Rome, for a few days’ filming. They did reverse shots on a scene filmed three months earlier in Safi, and the death of Desdemona, upon completing which Welles abruptly sped off, in full make-up, back to Rome. The shoot then moved to Venice, ‘cold, wave-ridden, echoing to the sound of bells and distant footsteps and the lapping of water on the marble, inexorably beautiful in the mirrored autumn twilight’, as MacLiammóir moodily put it, convinced now that if he and Edwards – who had joined him for various scenes as Brabantio – ever again played on a real stage in Dublin, ‘it would be a miracle’. The Italian shooting was completed in a month, some of it shot with Welles in absentia while he searched for new locations; on such occasions, Washinsky directed.
Once filming was complete, MacLiammóir, Edwards and Cloutier were flown first to Marseilles, en route – as they believed – for Morocco again; but instead of North Africa, they were transported to the idyllic artists’ colony at Saint-Paul-de-Vence in Provence, where they were greeted gloomily by Welles, who immediately set off for Paris. A few days later they joined him there. No explanation was ever offered for any of these bewildering peregrinations. Their lives had turned into a major-key rehash of Waiting for Godot, with a dash of Kafka – major key because they were excellently fed and watered and the locations were all charming, but the sense of disorientation was acute. They were beginning to doubt whether they would see Dublin that Christmas: ‘feel sure that Orson has plans for large Christmas tree in market-place at Mogador, entertainment probably to include brief but startling appearance of O himself as Santa Claus’. As if in defiance of the chaotic reality, Welles made a public announcement that Othello had completed filming and that he would soon be starting work on Ulysses, which was certainly putting a brave face on things.