by Simon Callow
we have come to expect something spectacular whatever he does – whether it be films, the theatre, or his choice of escort for the evening. The audience assembled for his first ballet expected anything to happen. In fact, had he walked through the auditorium leading a family of rattle-snakes with diamond collars, no one would have been very surprised. Even the interminable wait before the curtain rose . . . seemed some kind of Wellesery.15
When the piece finally started, the action proved to be very simple: a fairground barker announces that on his Arctic voyages a professor of archaeology has discovered a girl encased in a block of ice; the professor then draws back a curtain to reveal the block. A young man passes by; bewitched by the lady, he switches off the ice-machine. Flames and smoke fill the stage. They dance, and as they dance, she thaws. Realising her power, she enslaves him. The professor closes the curtains, but the lady draws them open again: there, frozen inside the block of ice, is the young man who loved her. Curtain.
All went well on the first night until the great canopy which was to reveal the young man now frozen in the ice block caught on the edge of the structure. The Daily Express gossip columnist was tailing Welles in the wings, from where he was watching the show. ‘It should have been fun,’ he said, ‘but it’s hell.’ ‘As the ballet went on Welles could not stand on his feet. He got down on his knees and leaned on his stick. And then he laid down full-length on the boards and cupped his head in his hand.’ When the canopy stuck, there was general panic. ‘Then the great voice of Welles rose up: “Continuez! Continuez! Let it tear! Let it tear! C’est magnifique!”’16 The effect, Richard Negri conceded, was indeed very striking: ‘what happened, which was rather marvellous in one way, is that the canopy then sort of unpeeled in a spiral, you see, and dropped.’ Welles had often remarked that a director’s job was to supervise accidents; now he was in his element. It was a very expensive accident, as it happens: the canopy had to be remade every night, and it never spiralled out in quite the same way ever again. But at least for that performance, in September 1953, they had a triumph: the ballet ended to a great roar of applause; Welles, hobbling on stage with a stick because of a sprained ankle, took great delight in acknowledging it. Such occasions were all too rare in his life.
The reviews, though mixed, were lively. The Express’s man said: ‘The new ballet by Orson Welles is terrific. Ballet is so often namby-pamby. Welles shows how exciting it can be – given a first-class new idea.’17 The most controversial aspect of the piece proved to be the prologue Welles had written and – unmistakably – delivered from off stage through a microphone, ‘in which’, said the Daily Telegraph, ‘he has pretentious things to say about the gradual closing in of the ice that is to engulf the world’. It seems to bear some family resemblance to the speech Micheál MacLiammóir recorded for Time Runs, with its apocalyptic intimations, and introduced, thought the Telegraph, ‘a crude and jarring note . . . to a poetic conception’.18 The Times Educational Supplement, less charitable, commented that ‘it was hard to imagine that, without his programme note, we would ever have known what Mr Welles intended us to think.’19
In Paris, Une Femme dans la glâce was not a success (‘very badly lit,’ said Welles, ‘as everything always is in Paris’). ‘I think they threw it in the Seine,’ said Negri. ‘It was never heard of again.’ It is an odd-man-out in Welles’s work, though deeply interesting and highly characteristic. Fable is one of the forms to which Welles was most often drawn, especially the fable which distils a bitter truth. This particular story seems not at all to demonstrate what Welles claimed in his programme note: far from showing that people are never in love to the same degree, it shows man as a helpless victim of woman, tragically fated to perish when he liberates her with his love. Welles was much given, especially during the 1950s, to statements about women, which, though no worse than the routine misogyny of the period, are certainly no better: ‘I hate women. I hate them generally, not in particular but in an abstract way. I hate them because one never learns anything about them. They are inscrutable.’ Bafflement and frustration seem at the root of these feelings. ‘A woman’s love may be more mature but is never as intense as a man’s . . . women cannot bear to be fooled. Men love it. The more intelligent they are, the more amused they are at being fooled. A woman gets angry if she doesn’t know how the thing is done.’ Woman was adrift, he felt. ‘She has the vote. She has independence and she still has not decided what she really wants to be.’20 All part of the standard contemporary battle-of-the-sexes discourse, perhaps a little more flamboyantly expressed, but Welles reverted to the subject with remarkable frequency. It was, at the very least, a subject of compelling concern to him, of which Lady in the Ice is a fairly explicit expression.
The ballet also brings us apocalyptic Welles, in the introductory ruminations on the forthcoming ice age (before the war it was British imperialism, after it neo-Nazism; then it was the atom-bomb, in time it would be the H-bomb), but most strikingly, it brings us First Person Singular Welles, the author entering the frame of his story and addressing the audience directly, a genre that Bill Kronshaw, borrowing from Northrop Frye, calls epos. This mode, which Welles explored extensively in his radio work of the Thirties, and in the trailers of his movies, was to become increasingly important in his work – the author/director shaping, introducing, mediating, qualifying the story. Welles as guide, as commentator. Everything filtered through Welles.
Meanwhile, Welles had met up again with his old mentor, Ludovicu Brecher, the former Soviet agent of Polish birth and Rumanian upbringing, who, under the name Louis Dolivet, had been a close associate of Jean Moulin, the great hero of the French Resistance. A few years later, Dolivet, by then in America, had met Welles through Beatrice Straight (whom he shortly afterwards married) and, finding Welles desperate to become politically active, had undertaken his political education, grooming him for high office, actively encouraging him to stand as Secretary General to the newly formed United Nations. After 1945 and the conference which established the UN, Welles went off the boil politically, and in 1947, as we know, he left America for an extended leave of absence. That same year of growing right-wing paranoia, Dolivet was denounced in a Washington newspaper for his communist past. He finally left for Europe after the breakdown of his marriage to Beatrice Straight, who had financed his magazines and his activities; when he tried to return to the United States after the sudden and mysterious death of their son by drowning, he was refused readmittance. He returned to Paris, where he continued his political activities, in very much the same vein as he had before. In 1953, he was appointed editor of a new monthly journal, Démocratie Combattante, whose political director was Henri Laugier, one of the authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and a co-founder of the World Health Organization, UNESCO and UNICEF; the magazine’s president was the distinguished trade unionist Léon Jouhaux, a Nobel Prize-winner and co-creator of the International Labour Organization. Despite its pedigree, Démocratie Combattante folded with the September/October edition (no. 6/7), but not before publishing an article by Welles, who had run into Dolivet again. The article, which took as its theme the question of systems, was a throwback to the Welles of his ill-fated New York Post daily column:
You always hear the notion that such and such a system has not been entirely developed or pushed to its logical conclusion. Thank God! It’s one of the blessings of humanity that no system has ever achieved total success. For it’s an established fact that the complete victory of an efficient system has always meant the burning of the books. Certain systems burn more, others burn only the best, and that’s the only difference.
He purveys a sort of despairing rhetoric, a last rallying cry in the face of the inevitable. It is tinged with deep political pessimism:
It is too late for the barricades – they have either collapsed about our heads or been trampled beneath our feet. The revolution too has become a system. In this second half of a century that organised the c
onquest of the material world and the slavery of the spirit, we must seek not methods but men. We must seek not strength among our leaders, nor discipline in the ranks, but the greatest possible number of human beings. Let us defend ourselves before all defence becomes impossible, let us move to the offensive before we lose forever the only values worth fighting for.
No sooner were Welles and Dolivet reunited than they began to plan a ‘Foundation For a New Humanism’, to embrace all their activities, artistic, literary and political. It would be financed by films which Welles would direct. Dolivet, who had never had anything to do with film before, would produce, and a screenplay that Welles had been working on earlier that year would be their first outing. In September they signed an agreement, and in December Welles sold the screenplay, which he called Masquerade, to Filmorsa, the company they formed. Shooting would begin in January 1954.
Before that, having established what he hoped would be a new phase in his life as a director, Welles briefly broke his self-exile and returned to America – not to Hollywood, to New York, to a new medium and an old sparring partner: William Shakespeare. He also had, in Peter Brook, as all too rarely for him, a director he greatly admired. The two men had met, in quintessentially Wellesian fashion, on the overnight cross-Channel ferry from Ostend to Dover. Welles, wrapped in a cloak and sporting a large black fedora, had loomed up out of the fog which, Brook said, seemed to proceed from his cigar. He appeared immediately to know who the younger man was, and to have seen all his ground-breaking productions; Brook in turn praised Welles extravagantly. Brook, ten years younger, was almost as much of a prodigy as Welles had been. At Oxford University, he had caused a stir with a production of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, largely because he had secured the services of the notorious Satanist Aleister Crowley as occult adviser on the play. After Oxford, at the age of twenty, he discovered an equally young Paul Scofield at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre; together they stormed the Shakespearean heavens. At the age of twenty-two he was appointed director of productions at Covent Garden Opera, famously collaborating with Salvador Dalí on a scandalous production of Richard Strauss’s Salome; at twenty-five, he transformed John Gielgud’s approach to Shakespeare in radical productions (the ones Welles had seen) of Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. The two men fell happily into conversation on the ferry, and started laying plans to work together; in fact, in 1947, eight years before Brook did Titus Andronicus with Olivier, he had asked Welles to play the part for him at Stratford, but Welles had been otherwise engaged. It was perfectly natural, then, that when Brook, in 1953, was asked by Robert Saudek of the Ford Foundation’s Radio-Theatre Workshop to do something for his trail-blazing arts television programme Omnibus, Brook should suggest King Lear with Welles in the title role. Saudek leapt at the suggestion, even though Welles’s reputation in his own country, in 1953, was somewhat cloudy.
He had, to all intents and purposes, been absent for six years, during a time of political turmoil and crisis in which many of his fellow-actors had been harassed and in some cases indicted. Welles had occasionally been mentioned in connection with his left-leaning colleagues, but his voice, hitherto so eloquent, so insistent, championing the social democratic corner right up to the moment of his departure, had not been heard, neither in self-defence nor in denunciation of the witch hunt. Professionally, he was viewed by America with bemused fascination. His films of Macbeth and The Lady from Shanghai had been released there and critically dismissed, but more in sorrow than in anger. News of his activities in Europe was scant. From time to time, rumours of a return would spread: in 1952, for example, he was firmly announced as bringing the London production of Othello to Broadway, in repertory with The Merchant of Venice, in which, of course, he would have given his Shylock; nothing more was ever heard of it. There was a general perception that, Citizen Kane notwithstanding, Welles’s real destiny was not in movies at all, but as a classical actor-manager; sometimes he even thought so himself, as long as he could be everything else, too of course. His time at the Federal Theatre Project – the Harlem Macbeth and Dr Faustus – and the Mercury Theatre – Julius Caesar and The Shoemaker’s Holiday – still lived in the memory of New Yorkers as part of a golden age of theatre, the classics new-minted. The wave of emotionally and sexually supercharged young actors emerging from Lee Strasberg’s Studio had shown no interest in the great classical tradition which in America stretched back to the Booths and down to the Barrymores. This gap, people felt, needed to be filled. America expected. It is not without irony, then, that Welles’s return to America and to the classics should have been stage-managed by an Englishman.
Despite some anxiety about possible complications in his tax situation, the project was irresistible to Welles: Lear had been in his sights for some time; he played the part seven years earlier, trombone-toned to begin with, then flutingly melodramatic in madness, in a thirty-minute radio digest of the play on the Mercury Summer Theatre of the Air, and was keen to have another go at it. But beyond that, Omnibus was exactly the sort of enterprise he passionately believed in. He had strong feelings about education; in interviews he was wont to remark that what he really wanted was to give everything up and concentrate on the really important task of harnessing film to education. Omnibus – wonderfully described by Saudek as ‘a variety show of the intellect’ – was specifically conceived as part of the cultural Cold War, to shake America out of its consumerist conformism and aid the development of ‘mature, wise and responsible citizens’. If that programme seems somewhat paternalistic, the execution of the programme was anything but. With the Anglo-American Alistair Cooke – informed but informal, master of the finely judged off-the-cuff introduction – as master of ceremonies, the touch was light without being lightweight, exactly what Welles had attempted on his own Almanac radio show of the 1940s, and with much the same mixture of elements. Omnibus’s opening show, in 1952, gave an excellent indication of how it meant to go on: it began with a little Gilbert and Sullivan, moved on to The Trial of Ann Boleyn, a new play by Maxwell Anderson starring Rex Harrison and Lili Palmer, then featured some dancers from Haiti and an adaptation of a short story by Saroyan, before showing the first moving images of X-rays of the human digestive system, and ended up with a respectful celebration of Veterans’ Day. Over its nine-year span it would feature, inter alia, Stokowski conducting Britten, the young and unknown James Dean acting, Mike Nichols and Elaine May’s first outing on television and Leonard Bernstein’s analysis of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. ‘The world was too full of wonderful things,’ said Saudek, ‘and television too few of them.’ King Lear, in Omnibus’s second year of transmission, was a huge and bold leap into the unknown for the programme: the entire ninety minutes was to be given over to one item. The show had an unprecedented budget: initial reports suggest $150,000, but that was later modified to $78,000 – still a vast sum for television; Welles himself was paid partly in cash, partly in travel, and partly ‘very high’ expenses.
Television was something about which Welles was increasingly if cautiously enthusiastic, though he hadn’t yet worked out, he said, what it really was. Explaining why he was doing King Lear, he told the New Yorker that he wanted ‘to find out something about television here. I’ve never seen an American television show.’ Having hitherto only toyed with the idea, he now started thinking about it seriously. Believing that every medium had a unique character, and that one medium should never attempt what was another medium’s preserve, he came to the conclusion that what was particular to television was its capacity to purvey fact: a perfect educational and documentary medium, then, but one which he thought would never be suitable for story-telling. His view, however, was shifting; in a couple of years, indeed, he would find a very brilliant way of telling stories on television. Now, in collaboration with his clever young director, he was prepared to take a gamble on King Lear. He was young for the part – thirty-eight, though you might have been
forgiven for thinking him older: European cuisine had bulked him out considerably and he was now weighing in at 275 pounds. It was an obvious part for him; as he often remarked, referring to the old division of actors into types, he was a ‘King actor’. Lear, he told an interviewer, was the only one of Shakespeare’s heroic characters he hadn’t played (not quite accurate: there was still Coriolanus, not to mention Titus Andronicus). And he was genuinely keen to work with Brook: ‘he is the best director for Shakespeare,’ he said, magnanimously.
But Welles was notoriously difficult. How, the press wanted to know, would young Brook fare? When the New York Times sat in on rehearsals for King Lear, it was disappointed to find that ‘not once did Mr Welles, famous on two continents for more self-esteem than humbleness, lose his temper or threaten to have anyone ejected from the hall.’21 It was all very low-key, the Times found: Welles – ‘who appears not to walk but to shuffle with an air of relaxed pomposity’ – wandered into the scene with Regan and Goneril, puffing on his cigar the while, ‘seemingly listening to the others only for his cues’. He took direction, said the Times, ‘graciously’, making jokes and the occasional suggestion. ‘Rehearsals meant Orson and me swapping ideas,’ remembered Brook, ‘trying, changing and discarding them with such relish that up to the last minute the poor performers had no idea where they were, especially as I was slashing the text as we went on.’ This was exactly the atmosphere Welles loved, the old Mercury Theatre atmosphere. The Times watched a rehearsal of the scene in which Lear and his fool come upon what they take to be a lunatic called Poor Tom. ‘Obviously the actor was enjoying himself immensely as all three roared away at one another,’ reported the Times. ‘When he bellowed the loudest, Mr Welles’s oval face resembled that of a baby yelling its head off for attention. Apparently,’ added the paper’s Val Adams, sadly, ‘his old time flamboyant spirit was satisfied to settle for the scenery-chewing role afforded by King Lear.’ The New Yorker was luckier: Welles obviously took to the interviewer and behaved with altogether more exuberance, despite being injected by a doctor as they spoke: ‘Infected throat. Antibiotics. Evil mixtures. I don’t understand them at all. You have to yell such a lot in this show! Hoot and holler! I’ve been abroad since 1948. I came back to do Lear . . . I thought it’d be a good idea to do Lear, because with the big beard no one can say I’m bad. They can’t even see me.’ On the whole, the American press regarded Welles as a strange beast just arrived from another planet, or perhaps another era, who might at any moment run amok.