Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  Design meetings at Harris’s studio were unconventional. Welles would arrive at eleven, having been in the hands of his masseurs for a good two hours beforehand, whereupon the studio would be invaded by Italian lawyers advising him on the suit he had taken out against a journalist who had accused him in print of being drunk while directing. On three separate occasions, Welles had failed to show up in court for the case he had brought, and the judiciary was becoming somewhat agitated. Eventually the case was tried with him in absentia and he was fined 5,000 lire (a bagatelle) for contempt of court. Even when Harris’s studio emptied of these extremely vocal advisers, Welles found it hard to concentrate on the matter in hand. On one occasion, a child on his bike was playing rather noisily in the yard just below the window of Harris’s second-floor studio. Welles said he couldn’t work if the child was going to make so much noise; Harris said there was nothing she could do about it. Welles, jaw grimly set, said there was something he could do about it, and he went to the window and stared out of it, silently. After a few minutes the child stopped making any noise. ‘I told you I’d stop him,’ said Welles. The following day, Harris heard that the child had suddenly fallen ill while playing. In time he recovered, but he never played in that yard again, and certainly never made any noise. It must be stressed that Percy Harris was one of the most down-to-earth, practical, rational people who ever lived, and was still, forty years later, at a loss to explain these events. Slightly chastened, she resumed her work, trying to give Welles what he wanted, but feeling that she never really did. Even more strongly than his musical instincts, Welles’s visual instincts were highly developed, and it took a certain kind of designer to enjoy translating his sketches into physical form; Harris was not one of them.5

  Two more actors joined the core team before rehearsals began in August: Basil Lord, a seasoned farceur, as Roderigo, and John Van Eyssen, whose first Shakespeare play this was, as Cassio; the rest of the cast joined after three weeks. Rehearsals proceeded in high spirits and with many anecdotal breaks; Welles was particularly keen on John Barrymore stories, especially the one about the time Barrymore, playing Hamlet, hurled his Ophelia into the wings with savage force one night, bruising her badly. When she asked him why, he replied, ‘You looked so pure.’ This story, oft-told, always made Welles roar. ‘He so obviously wanted to be Barrymore,’ Maxine Audley thought: elegant, fearless, passionate, impulsive.6 As far as Othello was concerned, he seemed to have no overarching conception of the play or, if he did, he failed to share it with them or explain why, indeed, he wanted to do it at all. He was fertile with views of the characters, however, as he had been with MacLiammóir during their early rehearsals for the film. He had very strong views, in particular, about Desdemona, whom he saw as essentially submissive and doll-like, which was very much how he had directed Suzanne Cloutier in the role. Ure was of another view, but did her best to play the character according to Welles’s lights.

  Welles was determined to get the actors to free themselves up. ‘I think he was probably the first person who ever said to me “Don’t mind if you make an asshole of yourself”,’ said Audley. ‘He said “You must make a noise when Peter stabs you in the back.” And I said “I’m afraid of making a funny noise.” He said, “It doesn’t matter, do it, make a fool of yourself.” I was rather ladylike I think, I was rather Shakespearian, and he knocked that out of me, he made me much more down to earth than I had been in Shakespeare.’ He pushed Finch towards rat-like qualities, emphasising the disparity in height between them. ‘He staged it beautifully,’ said Audley. ‘It was terrific to look at.’ But he was very firm with Finch, Ure and Audley that they must never touch him. This was scarcely an issue in rehearsals, because Welles himself rarely (if ever) acted with them, preferring to sit behind his desk, organising the action. His understudy, Michael Godfrey, stood in for him. Welles appointed him his whipping boy very early on, bullying him remorselessly.

  Ure concluded that Welles was anxious and insecure. ‘He had wanted to do this all his life and he was now getting the opportunity and he was terrified, absolutely terrified.’7 He confided in her his conviction that the public didn’t like him. ‘Now it does not help any actor to go on stage convinced that the public don’t like you because you’ll start ten miles back,’ said Ure. But she felt that he was right. ‘The West End theatrical public were out gunning for him. Somebody would come out of a doorway and try to trip him up. Like a lot of big men he’d stand at a bar, now he wouldn’t have hurt a fly . . . and people would try to pick a fight, they’d come up, they’d deliberately come up at the bar and try to goad him to react.’ She sensed great loneliness in the man. ‘You don’t expect to be rehearsing in the evenings but with Orson you were, that is Finchy and I were. We went back to his flat in Park Lane very often where I poured out large whiskies and Orson would pace up and down and talk and this would go on until about midnight because he didn’t want to be left alone.’

  Two weeks into rehearsals, Welles disappeared, leaving the actors to their own devices. He was going to a party in Italy, he said, airily. It was true; he was. But first there was the small matter of delivering a copy of Othello to the Venice Film Festival. He arrived in Venice at the end of August without the film, which he intimated had been held up by Italian customs; the director of the festival furiously and publicly denied this. Welles then proposed that the Italian version, prepared under someone else’s direction and dubbed by Italian actors, should be shown. It was duly sent for. Journalists waited for news while Welles and the projectionist went through it reel by reel. They discovered that it was totally out of synch, the calibration unacceptable. Bowing to the inevitable, Welles withdrew the film on the morning of the day it was to have been shown. To cancel one film you have entered in the film festival may be regarded as a misfortune; to cancel two looks like carelessness. Venice was not best pleased. Welles, rather bravely, called a press conference to apologise. Contrite and dressed in white, every now and then lifting his eyes heavenwards and speaking Italian ‘with a childish lilt’, reported the Corriere della Sera, he said: ‘Other directors move on, but I’m stuck. This film is my last chance and I can’t afford to make the wrong move.’ The film was finished, he said, but the only copy he could get hold of was not good enough: it needed accurate fixing and printing. It was, moreover, dubbed into Italian: he should have the right, he said, as both author and leading actor, to show the film with his own voice, ‘and not the voice of another actor, however good’.8 The journalists, spoiling for a fight, were taken aback and even, to some extent, won over: this was a new Welles, plaintive and touching, little-boy Orson, begging for mercy. It was unnerving and left them feeling slightly cheated, outmanoeuvred, the victims of a conjuring trick. Some suggested that he no longer wanted to enter the film for Venice, but was waiting for Cannes, where he was more likely to be appreciated. It did nothing to win their respect, even though, grudgingly, they extended their sympathy.

  Welles now headed for his party – right in the centre of Venice, as it happens, at the magnificent baroque Palazzo Labia just off the Grand Canal. This was no ordinary party, it was the party to end all parties, the most glamorous social event of the post-war period, perhaps of the century: Le Bal Oriental, a masked costume ball thrown by Don Carlos de Beistegui y de Yturbe, the diminutive Mexican multimillionaire who had only ever visited Mexico twice, and then only briefly. The guest list, a sort of amalgam of the Almanach de Gotha and Variety magazine, included the Aga Khan III, Barbara Hutton, Gene Tierney, Countess Jacqueline de Ribes, Count Armand de La Rochefoucauld, Paul-Louis Weiller, Cecil Beaton, Gala Dalí, Baron de Chabrol, Desmond Guinness, Alexis von Rosenberg, Baron de Redé, Prince and Princess Chavchavadze, Patricia Lopez-Willshaw, Fulco di Verdura, the Duchess of Devonshire, Princess Natalia Pavlovna Paley, Nelson Seabra, Aimée de Heeren, Princess Ghislaine de Polignac, Princess del Drago, Princess Gabrielle Arenberg, Hélène Rochas, Princess Caetani, Princess Colonna, Prince Mathieu de Brancovan and many others.
About thirty of the costumes had been designed by Pierre Cardin; the ball was his breakthrough. Christian Dior and Salvador Dalí designed each other’s costumes. Lady Diana Cooper came as Cleopatra, Daisy Fellowes as the Queen of Africa, Jacques Fath was le Roi Soleil and Arturo Lopez-Willshaw did a striking turn as the Emperor of China with his boyfriend, the Baron de Redé, as the Boy Emperor.

  Welles, whose costume had, inevitably, failed to materialise, came as no one in particular, swathed in silk, his pillbox hat topped with a vast and floppy feather. The tiny reclusive, misanthropic host, Don Carlos himself, bewigged and bedizened, his scarlet robes flowing gorgeously about him, towered above his guests in his sixteen-inch platform soles. Members of the Marquis de Cuevas’s ballet troupe danced sarabands and minuets; the firemen of Venice formed a human pyramid, four rows high, in the central room of the palace; a troupe of giants entered; and there were two jazz bands. It could have been directed by Fellini, with designs by Tiepolo. Venice, impoverished and glum since the war, was delighted to be the scene of so much conspicuous consumption. All of this Welles stored away in his mind until it re-emerged in Mr Arkadin.

  When Welles returned to Othello rehearsals after his eventful week away, he demanded a run-through of the play; afterwards he roundly told the company that they were all dreadful. By now the rest of the actors had joined them, and rehearsals had moved to the Ambassadors Theatre. The little world of London theatre was agog with rumours and anecdotes from the rehearsals; the latest Orson stories immediately did the rounds, with suitable embellishments. To the delight of the ghouls, all was clearly not well. Welles was frustrated, he told the actors; he felt they were too obedient, too efficient, too passionless. Their sheer Englishness was a burden to him. In ‘Thoughts on Germany’, which had appeared a couple of months before rehearsals began, he had offered some sharp thoughts about national characteristics. The cold-blooded Britisher, he said, was an invention of the nineteenth century; a hundred years before, the Englishman had been notorious for his effusiveness. ‘In any mask, there are holes to look through, and behind that stupid elaborately official face we catch in some lights the gypsy glitter of eyes belonging to the real Englishman grinning out at the rest of us – the eyes of Falstaff and of Hamlet. The eyes of crazy sea-dogs and wily statesmen – of a desperate, tender-hearted, naïve and demoniac people who are the world’s greatest poets, its first humourists, and most thorough-going madmen.’9 To revive this antic spirit in the pleasant, hard-working, cooperative members of his Othello company, Welles applied some shock tactics.

  Rehearsing the play on the tiny stage of the Ambassadors Theatre, he got hold of a twenty-foot pole used for adjusting the lights and pushed the actors around with it: ‘To hell with The Method!’ he roared. ‘This is the Welles way: act, you sons of bitches!’10 Perhaps it was a desire to convey to the actors the gargantuan nature of Elizabethan appetite that inspired him to have his meals brought in every day from the Ivy Restaurant opposite: he continued directing as he sat gorging in the stalls, addressing the cast through a megaphone. The actors were now struggling rather badly, precisely because he remained in the stalls. His hapless understudy – abused, mocked, roughly shoved around with the lighting pole – was playing Othello; Welles himself never set foot on the stage, which meant that the actors had no idea what sort of a performance he was going to give and were thus unable to create their own characters in relation to his. This can conceivably work on film; indeed, the film he had just shot was made on exactly that principle. But a theatre production is not made in the editing suite; it has to evolve as a whole. Everyone is interrelated. The transitions between scenes are crucial; the unfolding narrative is the responsibility of every single actor, however small his or her part. Unlike a film, a play is not a mosaic: it is a living organism in which all the constituent parts have been surgically connected to ensure that the blood flows through it, animating the whole, connecting the beginning to the end and all that lies between. This did not happen during rehearsals of Othello, with the result that the actors, as they headed out on the road – to Newcastle, and its the beautiful Theatre Royal – viewed the approaching first performance with fear in their hearts.

  Their anxieties were amplified when they got there and found a wholly incompetent crew making an absolute mess of the set. These were the LOP team, and their incompetence was legendary: the big problem, according to Percy Harris, was that ‘there was really nobody sober enough to get the production on.’ Harris suggested that Welles ask her then brother-in-law, George Devine – later to be one of the great men of the English theatre of the twentieth century when he founded the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre – to take over the physical production, which he did, occupying himself with the lighting and the functioning of the great brown-velvet front curtain, ‘the wipe’, as Welles called it, which was the central element of the set, and which almost never drew back when it should. The setting was relatively straightforward, consisting of an arrangement of rostrums and columns, a staircase and a flying window, but they were all large pieces; manoeuvring them into place depended on very specific coordination. It was the actors who had to move them: starting on Sunday night, they slogged away till five the following morning; as they left the theatre, Gudrun Ure saw the lines of people already queuing for tickets and wondered what sort of a show they were going to get later that night.

  Newcastle was wildly excited about the production. Journalists who interviewed Welles were above all exercised by the question of whether people would expect him to be Harry Lime when they came into the theatre. ‘What does it matter what they think when they come in?’ roared Welles. ‘It’s what they think when they come out that matters.’11 He had hired a trainer to get him into shape for the part. This was Fred Vallecca, who, reported the Chronicle, had boxed with Sugar Ray Robinson and Aly Khan, ‘and he has also taken on crocodiles’. Fred, whom Welles had met in Rome, was not just a trainer, he was a fan. ‘Orson Welles knows how to take care of himself,’ said Fred, ‘and has more energy than any of them. He loves the theatre. He is a great actor and the most interesting person I know.’12

  Earlier in the week the Newcastle Evening News had watched with awe as Welles consumed two complete meals one after another during the course of the interview, soberly reporting his claim that he was playing Othello because he had already played most of the other Shakespearean parts (he had, in fact, professionally performed exactly seven Shakespeare parts on stage – Hamlet’s dead father, Claudius, Mercutio, Tybalt, Brutus, Falstaff and Macbeth – plus a twenty-five-minute King Lear on radio). He enthusiastically described the tour that would follow the London run of the production: Bruges was fine – wonderful audiences; Rome and Vienna were fine; and then there was Stockholm (for Christmas), with parties and snow and torches and maybe even reindeer. Was it a good idea, they wanted to know, to direct and star in a play? It was not, Welles admitted, after a moment’s thought. His fellow-actors may have agreed with him. He reflected on his approach to theatre. ‘When I do the unorthodox,’ he said, ‘it is because I don’t know or have forgotten the orthodox. When people say I break tradition it is usually because I don’t know what the tradition is.’ He added that he was terrified of one line in Othello: ‘where shall I go?’ ‘It’s a grand opportunity,’ he said, ‘for someone in the gallery to shout “Back to America”.’13

  The audience never shouted out any such thing, though the actors might well have been tempted to do so. Having finally been released at 5 a.m., they were called for 11.30 later that morning; Welles failed to show up because, he said, he was tired. Consequently they never had a full dress rehearsal, simply skipping from one lighting cue to another, which meant they had never run the play at all before meeting the public. That night Ure was so terrified that she had to be slapped to get her on stage. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong: the curtain stuck, the pieces of the set ended up in the wrong place, the flying pieces became intertwined. Never having run the play f
ully, even in the rehearsal room, Welles – who now appeared on stage for the first time – came on from wherever he thought might be best, without reference to anything the understudy had done, speaking whatever lines came into his head, some but by no means all of them from Othello, and rarely in the right order. The result was certainly lively, but more often than not it meant that the actors found themselves in darkness, though Welles invariably managed to locate his own light.

  The set, with its high platforms, took a certain amount of negotiating, which Welles, never especially adroit at stage movement, found even more challenging than usual, since he had elected to wear massive platform soles, adding two or three inches to his regular 6' 3". His black make-up, which was also new to his fellow-actors, kept melting; every time he left the stage it needed to be refreshed by his diminutive dresser, Becky Martin, who was obliged to stand on stepladders in order to sponge it on, at the same time proffering him a bottle of brandy, from which he would gratefully swig, causing him to sweat even more. By the time he came to murder Desdemona, he was perspiring so profusely that Ure too was black from head to toe. By now Welles was scarcely in control of himself. ‘The mattress had slipped with his unexpected weight so that my head was against the edge of the wood,’ remembered Ure, ‘so he took me and went bang, bang, bang and my head went bang, bang, bang and the audience were screaming and I was left with half my back hanging over the rostrum; it was quite high, it must have been three, four feet off the ground.’14 The incident made it into the newspapers. ‘Maybe I got excited,’ Welles admitted to a reporter from the Evening News in the bar afterwards. ‘It was in a good cause’, gamely added Ure, ‘(rubbing her neck).’15 The Evening Chronicle, reviewing the production, noticed nothing untoward. They found it ‘fine and forthright: no frills, no nonsense’, and Welles himself ‘a grand, towering Othello’ who ‘declaimed with eloquence’.16