Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  ‘Orson Welles is rehearsing in a dilapidated theatre,’ reported France-Soir. ‘He’s in a foul temper. He’s had no voice for two days, is wrapped up in a heavy winter coat, communicates with the actors through his stage manager and only parts his lips in order to shout at someone.’ For the photo, the interviewer reported, Welles presented his back to the camera as in The Third Man, ‘then he turns round and fixes the lens with his staring bug-eyes. Orson’, he continues cattily, ‘is, like Louis XIV, staying at Versailles. Why doesn’t he sleep at the Palace one night? He deserves no less.’15 In early rehearsals Welles had been rather more cheerful, ‘but then,’ wrote Jenifer Howard, the young American actress who was playing the gossip columnist in The Unthinking Lobster, ‘things began to unravel, and Orson became increasingly distracted and, at times, thoroughly fed up and bored with the lot of us’.16 He was put out all over again, as he been on Othello, by Suzanne Cloutier. Rehearsals became very haphazard. The actors would arrive for a 10 a.m. call; Welles would show up at 5 p.m. ‘We might, or we might not, get a run-through. He was just as likely to sit round joking and telling wonderful stories for an hour and then take us all out for dinner. Sometimes work wouldn’t start till ten or eleven at night at which point little or less than little was achieved.’

  Hilton Edwards took over the rehearsals when Welles disappeared, which was increasingly often. Sometimes – not always – he was with the French film editor Jean Sacha, trying to make sense of the fifteen hours of material he had had developed from the Othello footage. Then suddenly he became interested in The Blessed and the Damned again. He and Edwards had seen a young black American singer in cabaret and were instantly overwhelmed by her; she had formerly been part of the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, she was called Eartha Kitt and Welles knew that he must have her. ‘A huge domineering-looking hombre-giant stepped his way towards me,’ she wrote in her autobiography. ‘I felt the electrifying waves of his personality hit me as he drew nearer. “Can you learn fast? We open on Saturday.”’17 He immediately sacked Suzanne Cloutier from the part of Helen of Troy, which he rewrote for Kitt, doubling it in size, and from then on all his energy and enthusiasm were given over to working on those scenes; The Unthinking Lobster, in which she did not appear, was given scant attention.

  ‘He could not tolerate ignorance of any kind. If one was not quick enough, Orson lost patience,’ wrote Kitt. ‘The quicker one was to receive what Orson had to give, the better his creative powers were.’18 The one thing Welles could never tolerate was slowness. He had wanted to sack Stanley Cortez on The Magnificent Ambersons for what he called his ‘criminal slowness’; George Fanto had suffered the lash of his whip for the same offence. But Kitt was not just quick – she was electric. ‘Those rehearsals were grand to watch,’ said Jenifer Howard. ‘His size and dark power were amazingly balanced by her cat-like grace and her lightness and quickness.’19 Often, Welles would dismiss the rest of the cast and the two of them would paint the set together, as they ran lines, and then they’d go and dine with Hilton Edwards. ‘They would eat huge meals,’ said Kitt’s biographer, ‘and the men would discuss Plato or Camus and get up from the table to declaim speeches from Shakespeare.’20 Kitt listened and learned. Then she and he would walk together through Paris and watch the sun come up over the Champs-Elysées, as they finally headed back to her hotel. ‘He would take me to my door,’ she wrote, ‘ring the bell and say, “À demain.”’ Kitt’s biographer has his doubts that things ended there.

  The burden of the music, naturally, fell on her, increasingly so as Welles realised what an astonishing vocal instrument she possessed. Halfway through rehearsals he had tracked down Duke Ellington to Milan and asked him to write five songs for the show. Ellington was happy to oblige: it was, he said, ‘one of the most extravagant gestures of flattery I have ever received’, from ‘a man of genius who happens to be a very dear friend of mine, Orson Welles . . .’21 He soon knocked off the songs (or, more likely, his composing partner, Billy Strayhorn, did), recorded them and sent them to Welles; a week later Welles called again: now he needed twenty-eight incidental music cues. Ellington was in Stockholm; Hilton Edwards was accordingly despatched there, only a week before the show was due to open, to work on them with Ellington and Strayhorn, which he did, acting out all the parts for them and hurrying back to Paris with what they had written. Strayhorn came with him, and set new lyrics for the show as quickly as Welles could come up with them.

  Technical rehearsals were, as usual with Welles, a nightmare, because he only really started to function creatively when he had everything at his disposal – the set, the light, the sound, the short film he had shot for the beginning of The Unthinking Lobster; there was also Micheál MacLiammóir’s recording of the opening and closing speeches of Time Runs to slot in. The opening was put off once, twice, three times. ‘The audience for last night was told that evening dress was obligatory,’ star reporter René MacColl told the readers of the London Daily Express, which, like several London newspapers, was following events keenly:

  When beautifully-gowned women and men in dinner-jackets arrived in the theatre they were turned away. Tonight in the darkened auditorium, I found thirty-five-year-old Orson Welles in a blue turtle-neck sweater rehearsing the Brainless Lobster company. He said: ‘I have been ready to open for a week. I don’t know what all this is about.’ At this point a girl came to the foot of the stage and said, ‘Mr Welles, those dresses are still not ready.’ ‘Never mind,’ said Welles. ‘Trouble?’ he went on. ‘Well, only a bit. We have had difficulties with the French technicians – they just don’t get our methods. They like to improvise. I hate improvising . . . but everything is ready.’ A young man came up and said, ‘Orson, we just can’t come to an arrangement about the piano.’ ‘Well,’ said Orson, ‘they can’t have any more money. That’s final.’ An ornamental curtain was lowered onto the set. Welles gestured at it moodily, ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Not a patch on how I envisaged it. When you order pink it comes out mauve. Heart-breaking. Then the scenery is put in the alley. I have not left the theatre for three days and nights. But we are all ready. You understand?’22

  Finally, after all these mighty labours, they opened and were politely received. Eartha Kitt remembers taking ten curtain calls, and an ecstatic press. It was: for her. About the plays the critics were less certain. Many reviewers were frank about the inadequacy of their own English; most thought the first play was an amusing enough squib, but that Time Runs was probably rather more interesting. It was all guess-work. Eartha Kitt certainly captivated them, but they were absolument bouleversé by Welles. As well they might have been, given the build-up he received in the programme booklet. First was a typical pen-portrait by Cocteau:

  Orson Welles is a giant with the face of a child, a tree filled with birds and shadows, a dog who has broken loose and gone to sleep in the flower bed. An active loafer, a wise madman, a solitary surrounded by humanity, a student who sleeps during the lesson. A strategy: pretending to be drunk to be simply left alone. Seemingly better than anyone else, he can use a nonchalant attitude of real strength, apparently drifting but guided by a half-opened eye. This attitude of an abandoned hulk, and that of a sleepy bear, protects him from the cold fever of the motion picture world. An attitude which made him move on, made him leave Hollywood, and carried him to other lands and other horizons.23

  Welles provoked this sort of writing, especially among the French. His friend and unofficial PR man, Maurice Bessy, contributed a piece that starts:

  He comes on stage and nothing exists but his presence. He offers the spectacle of his strength and of his intelligence, an untamed strength with an indefinable something that is malicious and incurable. A raw strength, chiselled in granite. He appears and we experience the gasp of emotion that scorches the air in a moment of danger . . . we know that his soul fits a unique being of supple genius and breeding. We know that he acts and gives himself as a man; and receives with the soul of a woman . . .
he is the most worldly of bohemians and the most tender of Don Juans.

  The piece ends: ‘He is alone on this earth. Alone with a few pieces of baggage. Cherish him because he is not made in the same cast as the everyday man, because he is part of an extra group, a challenge to God.’ Georges Beaume’s piece, entitled ‘Orson Among Us’, as if he were the Lord’s anointed, told the possibly bemused Parisian theatregoer that at a time when vapidity was everywhere, Welles was, ‘along with Malraux, Picasso and Lawrence of Arabia, if not the highest, then certainly the most modern manifestation of the demon of the absolute’.24

  The critical fraternity understandably felt the need to rise to the challenge of all this ecstatic prose. The temptation to out-Cocteau Cocteau proved irresistible: ‘The arrival of Welles on the Parisian stage – this bear with the face of a fallen angel lolling among the clouds – is a revelation. For us, this theatrical manifestation of his is more convincing than what we know of him from films . . . however infinitely indefinable, he is himself, 4-dimensional, splendid, unusable, you either reject him or embrace him, like thunder or mandragora.’ At least Cocteau had the excuse of being an opium addict; what were these chaps on? ‘He’s the last of the monstres sacrés. A super-monstre sacré, in fact, because he combines the jobs of designer, author, director, actor. He has Orson-Welles syndrome . . . an enfant terrible (Cocteau’s son, perhaps?) who is also Prospero, Caliban, Ariel, he demands love or hate.’ This same critic, however, had his feet sufficiently on the ground to end his review: ‘I would by the way like to know why the ticket prices have been doubled at the Édouard VII,’25 which may offer a clue as to why nobody, alas, came to see the show.

  Anglophones, and in particular American tourists, may have been rather put off by Art Buchwald’s ‘Paris after Dark’ column in the International Herald Tribune:

  Orson Welles has many personal grievances against Hollywood. In his new play The Unthinking Lobster . . . [he] gets most of them off his chest. It has gags aimed at a few of the Brown Derby crowd, and a sophomoric message that left the audience embarrassed as well as cold . . . instead of a rapier, the author-actor uses a sledge-hammer to get his point across . . . unimaginative sets and the less said about the staging the better. Welles’s revenge boomerangs, and The Unthinking Lobster becomes a satire of Orson Welles doing a satire on Hollywood.

  On the other hand, he said, ‘Time Runs . . . has a great deal of good theatre value and saves the evening from being entirely wasted.’26 Micheál MacLiammóir, visiting the play for the first time, described it as ‘a worry’ and asked himself (in the diary that would later be published as Each Actor on His Ass) whether it could be because of what he called ‘the curiously suffocating darkness that hovers over it, a sense of foreboding and damnation brilliantly stated, that turns the evening into a brooding vulture’.

  The first and much lighter of the two plays, The Unthinking Lobster, is in effect a curtain-raiser, a broad boulevard satire on Hollywood, a subject to which Welles was irresistibly drawn and to which he kept reverting throughout his career, despite his frequent and very public dismissals of the place. The satire, as Art Buchwald rightly suggests, is fairly scattergun, taking in rather more than Hollywood. Welles insisted in interviews that it was not about movies at all: it was, he said, ‘about the conditions in which grace’ – in the theological sense of the word – ‘can exist’. The premise is droll enough: Hollywood is in the grip of religious fever; Jake Behoovian, boss of the Zitz-Cosmic studio, decides to make a film about St Anne de Beaumont, a French-Canadian peasant who cures the sick and infirm of French Canada, tossing aside their crutches and bandages – clearly a wicked send-up of Suzanne Cloutier in her more rapturous moments. The film is being directed by a certain Sporcacione, an Italian semi-documentarian – Welles’s dig at the neo-realists – who has decided that, for greater verisimilitude, the disabled should be played by the disabled. The star, however, has dropped out, and so Behoovian’s secretary, Miss Pratt (Cloutier), agrees to stand in for her. In the course of filming she actually cures the cripples: a miracle, in Hollywood! An archbishop is summoned to check her credentials; he determines that the secretary is an authentic saint. Hollywood falls apart: people no longer take meetings – they pray. To sort things out, an Archangel descends and strikes a deal: if Hollywood makes no more movies about heaven, heaven will make no more miracles in Hollywood.

  It’s slight stuff, though just sometimes Welles seems to be edging towards something deeper: the Archbishop asks Nancy Pratt, the celluloid saint, ‘You believe you love God?’ And she answers, ‘Despite miracles. Despite cheap paintings, relics, bad sweating, bleeding, groaning statues, yes. You say that I have committed the sin of pride. But I can’t lie to you: I love Him. The world, full of ugliness, is in agony. I don’t love that.’ Mostly Welles seizes the opportunity to get some aperçus off his chest: Behoovian (played by Welles) is given the line with which Welles delighted to bait Italian journalists: ‘As for Italy – I forget who said it – Italy’s a nation of actors, the least good of whom are the professional ones.’ The fake Archduke, who runs the exclusive Hollywood eatery called Chez Chi-chi, says of theatre acting: ‘Well, it’s not exactly normal. But what’s normal about painting your face and showing it in public? It’s a little deranged, frankly. Like making love. And a good actor is a good lover . . . like a lover, he tries to conceal the embarrassing reality; what he does to achieve that is truly ridiculous. Oh, it’s not easy! Six nights of partying, plus matinées.’ Which perhaps tells us more about Welles’s attitude to love-making than to the theatre.

  There is a rather half-hearted attempt to link this first play to its Faustian companion piece: ‘What d’you want me to do?’ says Zitz, of the contract that has been offered to him, ‘sign it in blood?’ And there are some sub-Pirandellian meta-theatrical musings: ‘For us artists, every performance contains a whole lifetime of virtue and sin,’ says the phoney Archduke. ‘Every exit is a death. And the fall of the curtain is as . . . final as the Last Judgement. Heaven, for us, is suspended on a painted drop at our backs, and there’s no hell beneath us – it’s in front of us . . . where we’re looking. For us, where we were looking during the play no longer exists.’

  The piece is a jeu d’esprit – a trifle – but it is nonetheless part of Welles’s capacious range of enthusiasms. In the telling phrase of Bill Krohn, Welles was not a radical; he was a man of many nostalgias. Throughout his career in the theatre and on radio and on television, though not on film, he indulged in his passion for past forms – among other things, low comedy, high comedy, screwball comedy, spectaculars, farce, to say nothing of magic. For the most part it has to be admitted that, magic aside, he had no real gift for any of these things. The Unthinking Lobster attempts a peculiarly French form, the light comedy of ideas, but the form demands, paradoxically enough, a certain rigour, which is here absent; neither the ideas nor the comedy quite work. Welles’s conviction that he had examined the question of the conditions under which Grace can flourish – why not in a Hollywood studio? – is mistaken. He obviously wants to have fun, too, but doesn’t quite manage to: both the dialogue and the invention are more than a little tired. He was once again pursuing the ignis fatuus of his life, the quest for popular success. The motive was partly financial, but also, quite simply, because he liked to make people laugh. With The Unthinking Lobster, on the whole he failed in this ambition.

  Time Runs – ‘an old legend in a new mixture’ – is another matter. Owing something to Welles’s mentor and friend Thornton Wilder, it presents Faust sometimes as his medieval self, sometimes as modern man; it meditates on the human condition in a collage of pregnant phrases from great writers – mostly Marlowe, whose Dr Faustus Welles had directed with such electrifying results in New York in 1936. These passages are linked by wistful connecting sequences by Welles himself, the whole thing underpinned and woven together by the music Welles loved above all other: jazz. It is scarcely a play at all, being, as Welle
s’s chum Cocteau might have said, not so much a text as a pretext, offering opportunities for production. The piece changed radically in rehearsals and during production, though the essential form remained the same: a voice-over at the beginning tells us that there has been a great catastrophe and that we are in ‘the last year of the first Age after Christ’. A chorus of ‘three intelligent negro girls’ tells the story of Faust. Mephistophilis appears as a friar and makes himself known to Faustus, which causes the girls to sing: