Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  The truth of the matter was that he was increasingly anxious about money; his last earnings had been in April, on The Black Rose. With no handy $100,000 on offer from a passing blockbuster, he had started to think in terms of a theatre tour, to kick off in Paris and then to play such centres as Brussels, Antwerp, Lille and Amsterdam. It would consist of a double bill comprising The Importance of Being Earnest (slightly cut) and Marlowe’s Dr Faustus (savagely cut). Edwards would direct Earnest and play Canon Chasuble and Marlowe’s Prologue; Welles would direct Faustus and play Algernon Moncrieff and Faustus; while MacLiammóir would play Jack Worthing and Mephistopheles, having by now presumably accepted that villainy was well within his range. Suzanne Cloutier would play Cecily and – ‘poor child’, remarks MacLiammóir – Helen of Troy, while Fay Compton, if they could get her back, would be Lady Bracknell. They would ask Dior to design the costumes and André Derain to do the set. Of course they would.

  After a few more days of ebullient planning, still at the stage where everything seems possible – Dior? pourquoi pas? Derain? mais naturellement – Edwards and MacLiammóir gratefully returned, just in time for Christmas, to Dublin, where a card from Welles was waiting for them: ‘Miss you badly already and hope for wonderful things in New Year.’ There were affectionate phone calls on Christmas Day, but no certainty as to what was going to happen next. Welles wrote to them from the Hotel Lancaster in Paris, by no means encouragingly: ‘As 1949 prepares to die of old age I want to acknowledge that I’ve made it pretty awful for both of you. Come what may (and it probably will) you deserve to know how earnestly I’m going to balance the budget before next Christmas . . .’8 But then, in the New Year, something wonderful happened, just as Welles had hoped: the French-Algerian financier/producer Edmond Tenoudji of Films Marceau came through with 12 million francs in exchange for the French distribution rights, so filming could resume.

  In mid-January 1950, MacLiammóir was duly summoned to Mogador, which was reached, as usual, by slow and exhausting steps via Paris and Fez. There were some changes of personnel: George Fanto was now sole director of photography; young Patrice Dally (who would later assist on Rififi) replaced Washinsky as assistant director; and James Allan was art director in place of Trauner. Welles himself did not appear for ten days and, when he did, it was with a lovely Swedish actress on his arm, a very classy tootsie indeed, dubbed by MacLiammóir ‘Belle of Stockholm’. For the most part, filming was focused and productive; with the aid of photographs and print-outs of footage, Welles and Fanto had worked out in advance exactly what was needed to complete the film. Time was limited, money tight. None of the other actors, apart from the irrepressible ‘Schnucks’, were present. Everyone and anyone was liable to be enlisted into lending a back, a shoulder or a neck, supposedly belonging to Cassio, Montano or Roderigo. Welles was in bonhomous form, which may have been not unconnected to the presence at his side of ‘Belle of Stockholm’, with whom from time to time he would slip off. ‘Orson disappeared to unknown destination,’ wrote MacLiammóir. ‘Maybe the Moon but suspect Casablanca.’ On such occasions Welles would leave long and detailed instructions as to precisely what he wanted shot.

  ‘Canons from the wall as already established . . . if there is a windless day, remove the flags from the standards because they would look ridiculous without wind. The camera doesn’t move from Othello to the castle but from the castle, through the wall, to Othello; the opposite of what would seem logical . . . hand held camera following the flight of seagulls for the idea of delirium . . . shot of canons firing and Othello rising to his feet after epileptic fit: use English film . . . DON’T FORGET THE CANONS DON’T FORGET THE CANONS.’

  All this, said Mancori, ‘in imperfect Italian’.9

  The mood darkened somewhat when the unit transferred to Mazagan, to the north of Mogador where Welles had discovered a fifteenth-century Portuguese cistern of striking appearance, outside which he had decided to take a wide-shot of the brawl between Cassio, Montano and Roderigo (all played by doubles, of course); later, Desdemona would meet her end there. ‘Its beauty, of undeniable and bewildering quality,’ wrote MacLiammóir, ‘only equalled by its enormous size, foetid, clinging air, and general aspect of nameless doom.’ Transforming it into a filmable location was a huge labour, which Welles entrusted to George Fanto, who had now become de facto production manager, as well as director of photography. Fanto set to work, day and night, with his crew, restoring columns, filling the cistern with water into which, somewhat riskily, he put aniline dye to make it sparkle, and building interlocking platforms to keep the lights and cables out of the water. ‘It took endless hours of work with unskilled Moroccan labour.’10 Finally, suffering from laryngitis and a high fever, he took himself off to the hotel, much to Welles’s freely expressed vexation. His reproaches greatly upset Fanto. Welles wrote him a note later that night, telling him that he deeply appreciated how much he had sacrificed to keep on working in the cistern, but, ‘my dear George, it does not justify the general (that’s you) walking off the set because you’re hungry or tired or sick’. Next day he sent him another, longer letter. It is a remarkable document in many ways. Welles begins by apologizing to Fanto for his bullying, assuring him that, if Fanto should ever take ‘the human risk’ of working with him again, he would not be subjected to such behaviour. He recognizes that any cameraman working on such a tight schedule would need strength of character, and even more so when having to accommodate what Welles acknowledges to be his often unreasonable demands. Pushing, Welles explains, is often a necessary expedient, if never a pleasant one.

  He acknowledges, however, that his method of carrying out such pushing may not be the right one for Fanto – is, in fact, ‘obviously all wrong.’

  But there’s no use my pretending that under these present conditions my style of pushing on a set is going to change. And when any shot (an exterior without lighting especially) isn’t ready after nearly two hours I’m afraid I’ll be heard from, nor am I likely to welcome replies in terms of marital difficulties, divorces and such personal items.11

  Welles refuses to regard such talk as ‘courageous,’ lamenting, as he had done at the time, the introduction of the personal note whenever he feels the need to crack the whip. In response to Fanto’s plea that such measures should be avoided, Welles comments, ‘I’d very much like to be able to throw that instrument away, but the shorter the budget the longer the whip.’ He hardly needs, he says, to remind Fanto that their budget is as short as they come, that they are ‘nerve-rackingly enough at the dead-end of [their] money and indeed of money-making possibilities.’ They have to stay on schedule; there is no option.

  Welles again asserts his deep and warm friendship with Fanto, but goes on to make it clear that he does not regard the matter in hand as being either of friendship or even of good will. He will be tactful, he says, in his future dealings with Fanto, but bluntly warns him that if Fanto ever falls behind in his work as he had done the day before, ‘I will break my promise.’

  Welles ends by saying that it would delight him if Fanto were not to decide against working under such conditions, protesting again that he wants Fanto to know how enormously he regrets his part in the previous day’s unpleasantness.

  It is the letter of a monomaniac, a man for whom no rules, no human considerations exist when there is a film to be made. He demanded the maximum of himself – that much no one could deny – and he expected the same of all his partners in the work: he has an almost Christ-like expectation that those who work for him will be ready to abandon mother, wife, child: He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Welles is the way, the truth and the life: he who is not with him is against him. For a man of a religious disposition like Fanto, it was an irresistible call. In an age long before health-and-safety regulations, Welles expected that his cohorts would risk everything for the film. For him. It is the language of
a commander rallying the troops – Henry V, Patton. And it is true that Welles was waging war on all fronts, and that, for the film, it was a matter of life and death. And there would always be people who were ready to take, as Welles so pithily put it, the human risk of working with him.

  There is a postscript to the letter:

  If you aren’t better, don’t come to work till you are. If you determine to get up – then you must stay up.

  Fanto got up; and he stayed up. Who wouldn’t have?

  As it happens, it was Hilton Edwards who actually directed the sequence in the cistern. Welles genuinely wanted his old boss to try his hand at the medium, insisting, as he always had done, that there was no skill to directing movies that couldn’t be picked up by an intelligent person in a morning, but also convinced that a stage director as imaginative and forceful as Edwards undoubtedly was, would be an excellent film director. Edwards was shyly determined to give it a stab; Welles very seriously proposed during the making of Othello that Edwards should direct a film of Julius Caesar with Welles as Brutus. There is no question that Welles meant this sincerely; but the offer was another manifestation of the complicated relationship that he had with Edwards and MacLiammóir, indissoluble partners in life and in art (though no longer, for many years past, in bed). Edwards was to all outward appearances a hearty, vigorously masculine man, MacLiammóir a feline aesthete with something uncanny about him, witty, eloquent and unnervingly intuitive. Welles was instinctively drawn to Edwards, with whom he made common cause, sometimes to the exclusion of MacLiammóir: he and Edwards – sensible men of the world, practical, efficient, capable – mocking MacLiammóir’s vanity, his apparent illogicality, his inability to handle the electrical or mechanical apparatuses of the twentieth century.

  MacLiammóir watched, bided his time, made mental notes – and written ones, too, in the diary he religiously kept, day in and day out, in Irish, as a protection against prying eyes. ‘Why is it, I wonder,’ wrote Welles in the surprisingly candid Foreword to Put Money in Thy Purse:

  that most of us who are Micheál Mac Liammóir’s friends – having never been his victims – are so very certain that at any minute we might be? . . . In company, that Micheál of ours doesn’t slash or slaughter, or even prick, but lavishly spreads about him, instead, the pleasant oils and balms of good humour. He is an entertainer rather than a conquistador, a good companion, who could certainly scratch, but who prefers to purr . . . I now reveal his true, his darkest secret. It is simple almost to the point of squalor: he keeps a diary!

  Welles’s friendship with the partners was a deep one, one of the deepest of his life, a potent brew of something almost filial with something nearly sexual, but it had endured (and was again to endure) some very rough patches, at which Put Money in Thy Purse only hints. Rocky times were to come.

  Meanwhile there was the bravura opening sequence of Othello to be shot: the funeral processions of Othello and Desdemona, and what MacLiammóir fearfully referred to as the Cage Scene, in which Iago is roughly hauled up to the top of the ramparts in a wooden crate as Othello and Desdemona are carried off in their coffins. ‘This Orson’s invention and I’ve been dreading it for months.’ As he was hauled up, the local population stood in respectful silence; as he descended, they applauded. After that it was down to the Cistern, ‘the Underworld’, as MacLiammóir named it, ‘gazing camera left with tense expression at nobody at all, turning, twisting, peering through windows, and getting myself kicked, prodded, slapped, pushed, and trodden on by extras till I was black and blue’; and then back to the ramparts, to be dragged along at the end of a piece of rope with what he called the dog-collar round his neck, tugged and jerked back and forth and sideways. The final sequence on which MacLiammóir worked was the intricate travelling shot in the scene that preceded Othello’s epileptic fit. There were seven takes, MacLiammóir noted, and it was by now 7 March; after the last take, Welles announced, ‘Mr MacLiammóir, I am happy to tell you you are now an out-of-work actor. You have finished Iago.’ Like many other things to do with the film of Othello, this valediction proved to be illusory, but for the time being it inspired MacLiammóir to a celestial vision of his ‘friends and fellow-adventurers’, which forms the last paragraph of Put Money in Thy Purse:

  Already I see them in my mind’s eye as if painted on a gauze, through which the back-stage lighting will presently shine, revealing other scenes and other characters . . . Trauner and Dally and Brizzi and dear Fanto and the rest of them standing in serried ranks, the banners of their trades a-flutter stiffly above their heads. And behind and beyond them all is Orson, mysteriously grimacing as he lolls towards them with hands outstretched, waving Godspeed from his rolling banks of cumulus and thunder-cloud, the Painted Lightning forked ambiguously behind his head.

  Welles had no such sense of celestial harmony. His first job, once he was back in Rome, was to raise money to start to put all this together; not to mention paying the cast and, indeed, Trauner. All local sources of revenue had dried up. He discovered that his old friend Darryl Zanuck was holidaying at Cap d’Antibes and so, in a reckless gesture, he climbed into a cab and told the driver to take him to the French Riviera. Once he’d found Zanuck at supper with friends, Welles knelt before him and begged for help. Zanuck offered him nearly 200 million lire in exchange for 50 per cent of the English-language distribution rights. Italian currency restrictions meant that he had to justify the amount with the authorities, which Papi, still production manager (but no longer Padovani’s lover), duly arranged, at the same time applying for financing for an extra ten weeks’ shooting. No wonder the Painted Lightning in MacLiammóir’s vision had forked ambiguously behind Welles’s head. The final tableau was far from achieved.

  Welles himself went to Taormina, taking with him the script of Ulysses – not the version over which Borneman had so long toiled, but a rival version to be produced by Dino De Laurentiis and directed by the great German director G.W. Pabst, with Greta Garbo coming out of her decade-long retirement to play Penelope, and Welles himself in the title-role. He hummed and hawed long enough to convince De Laurentiis that he was going to go ahead with his own version, and was duly paid a lot of money not to do so. But however much Welles got from De Laurentiis, it was not enough to take Othello forward or to cover his debts, despite the dribble of funds being slowly released from 20th Century Fox. Welles was gently but embarrassingly reminded of what he owed MacLiammóir and, to a lesser tune, Edwards, both of whom were in desperate trouble financially: they believed – with the perfect financial innocence that had characterised the whole of their always perilous tenure of the Gate Theatre – that they would be paid for the whole period of their work on the film, rather than just the days they had actually filmed.

  As a way of killing a number of birds with one stone, Welles began to turn again to the plans for a theatre evening, about which he and Edwards and MacLiammóir had become so excited the previous December. MacLiammóir had said then that he and Welles were longing ‘to trumpet about on a stage again’, which was certainly true for MacLiammóir and probably true for Welles. It was presumably in Taormina that he ran up the two plays that he proposed they should do – not the bewilderingly improbable double bill of The Importance of Being Earnest and Dr Faustus that he had originally suggested, but an entirely new play satirising Hollywood, called The Unthinking Lobster, and a new version of the Faust story, incorporating chunks of Marlowe and Milton plus a pinch of Dante, all washed down with a lot of Welles. To this he gave the name Time Runs (‘The stars move still,’ says Faustus as he dies, ‘time runs, the clock will strike / The Devil will come and Faustus must be damn’d’). He called the double bill The Blessed and the Damned, and they represent Welles’s first and only attempt at playwriting since his two boyhood efforts, written before he was seventeen; he had long ago shown himself to be a play-editor of genius, but that of course is a very different skill.

  Welles had somewhere along the line hoo
ked up with an ambitious young French producer called Georges Beaume, who in turn had an association with Pierre Beteille, the owner of the splendid Édouard VII Theatre off the boulevard des Capucines: they would do the plays there in mid-June of 1951. Welles immediately approached MacLiammóir and Edwards; MacLiammóir turned him down, pointedly preferring to judge an amateur drama festival in Kerry, but Edwards – out of affection for Welles, no doubt, but also in the hope of recovering some of the money they were still owed and so desperately needed – signed up to play the Archbishop in the first play and Mephistophilis in the second, to design the light and generally supervise the production. Somewhat surprisingly, Welles invited Suzanne Cloutier to play Helen of Troy in Time Runs and, more fittingly, Miss Pratt the secretary who becomes a star in The Unthinking Lobster; she was flush from her recent success in Julien Duvivier’s Au royaume des cieux, which might have helped the box office. It certainly needed help: the rest of the cast was assembled from inexperienced young Americans drifting through Paris. Duke Ellington, no less, had agreed to write the score, which one might have thought would have created something of a stir, but curiously little was made of it.

  The management had a challenge on its hands anyway, trying to sell two plays in English during the summer, when half of the theatres were closed and most of the population had decamped to the coast. Welles’s fame was the only pull. He was indeed très connu in France: Le Troisième Homme, which had won the Grand Prix in Cannes the year before, was as big a hit in Paris as it was everywhere else, and Welles had come out of it particularly well, as Truman Capote, who happened to be in Paris at the time, noted in a letter that reveals something of the general view of Welles’s acting: ‘saw the most wonderful movie. Carol Reed’s The Third Man. Orson Welles is in it – superbly, believe it or not.’12 Welles had a powerfully articulate following among young French film-makers, but their fine words, alas, buttered no parsnips. Nonetheless, Beaume managed to whip up a storm in the press with some remarkable claims: ‘It’s almost certain’, reported a breathless Parisien libéré, ‘that Orson Welles will be performing four of his own plays on a Paris stage. Such is the excitement’, it continued, ‘that Box Offices will be set up in Paris, in London and in New York.’13 L’Aurore easily topped that: ‘The announcement of the show has created such excitement in the artistic world, that an aeronautical company has arranged special flights between Paris and Rome and London and Paris.’ The forthcoming Paris premiere of Black Magic added still more mysterious and glamorous dimensions to Welles’s profile: it was promised that Welles, in person, would adjudicate – while lunching with a few famous friends – a sensational trial of wits between two eminent fakirs as to which could stay buried underground in a coffin the longest. ‘Cagliostro-Welles will give 50,000 francs to the winner.’14 Encounters with the Press were lined up on a daily basis, but the journalists who interviewed him found the cause of all this excitement in surly form.