by Simon Callow
For the most part, though, he was glad to be part of the London theatre; a week after the opening of Moby-Dick he took part in The Night of a Hundred Stars, a midnight charity gala, in which, rather oddly, he acted with Richard Attenborough in a scene from Attenborough’s recent hit film, The Guinea Pig. And Welles was seen in all the familiar actors’ eating haunts, like Le Caprice, where one night he ran into the man who had launched him on his spectacular career in the Federal Theatre in 1936, but whom he now regarded as his mortal foe, John Houseman. They hugged each other as if there were nothing but love and good memories between them. Houseman told Welles how eager he was to see Moby-Dick, ‘about which I had heard and read such good things’. He was not sure, he said, which night he was coming because he was waiting to hear from Stratford, where Laurence Olivier was playing Macbeth, ‘to which it was virtually impossible to buy a ticket’. The glasses on the table suddenly leapt and crashed as a huge fist slammed onto the table. ‘Orson was on his feet. His eyes were glazed and his face had the sweaty gray-whiteness of his great furies. Very quietly and intently, underlining each word as though addressing a child or a half-wit, he said, “It is more difficult to get seats for Moby-Dick than it is for Macbeth. For twenty years, you sonofabitch, you’ve been trying to humiliate and destroy me! You’ve never stopped, have you? And you’re still at it!”’ Houseman headed for the door, his wife on his arm. ‘Behind us I could hear Orson howling . . . that I’d better not stick my filthy nose into his theatre; if I did he’d come down off the stage and personally throw me out!’
Houseman saw the show the following night. ‘It had all the excitement and magic that were Orson’s special theatrical virtues.’37 But he didn’t go backstage afterwards. In fact, they didn’t see or speak to each other again for another twenty-five years, and then only on television, sitting on a couch on a chat show, after which they shook hands and went their separate ways.
Someone else who never made it backstage after Moby-Dick, though not for want of trying, was Louis Dolivet, Mr Arkadin’s unhappy producer. His relationship with Welles, strained since Dolivet had required him to be absent from the editing suite in order to get a signed-off copy of the film, had broken down irretrievably. Welles refused point-blank to have anything to do with him. This may in some measure be connected with Paola Mori’s open dislike of Dolivet, who had been uncomplimentary about her performance in the film, which now had a life of its own, quite separate from Welles.
The novel (written, as we know, by Maurice Bessy) had come out under Welles’s name, and the film, in effect edited by Dolivet, had been signed up for distribution by Warner Bros, who requested a new title for it. Welles himself supplied it – Confidential Report – though one of the other titles by which he sometimes referred to it might have been a little more alluring: Arkadin the Adventurer. Dolivet, smarting from the financial losses he had incurred, formally proposed that Welles might like to assume full ownership of the film by paying back the cash investment and settling outstanding debts; unsurprisingly, Welles declined the offer. Still the Arkadin roadshow rolled on, like the film’s pilotless plane: early in August a five-part serialisation of Confidential Report, allegedly specially written by Welles, but more probably by Mankowitz, appeared in the London Daily Express. It’s scarcely more than a simple precis of the film, with little character or flavour. A few days later there was the gala world premiere in London of what Welles called the ‘selling copy’ of Confidential Report; Dolivet and Bob Arden were there, but Welles and Paola Mori (the film’s leading lady, after all) were conspicuously absent. The reviewers were underwhelmed, but not unduly contemptuous: ‘it is, qua plot, quite a good plot; it has a beginning, a middle and an end, though they don’t come in that order, and plausibility is a word in some other language. But Welles is far too big,’ said Punch. ‘He bulges out of the interstices of the plot, he fills the auditorium . . . ah, well, it’s certainly an exciting film to see, provided you don’t let yourself get mad at it.’38
Welles also skipped the premiere of the Spanish version in Madrid, with the two rather disappointing Spanish actresses who replaced Flon and Paxinou as the Baroness and Sophie. He appears, in fact, to have given up on the film. He ignored the February 1956 re-edit, which cut the whole flashback structure; he did not show up at Cannes in April when this version was shown there.
But still the Arkadin machine ran on autonomously: in May 1956 the British Argosy magazine published a condensed version of the novelisation under the title Dark Journey: ‘Welles’s bow as a major novelist,’ says the magazine. ‘A new milestone in Mr Welles’s contribution to entertainment.’ And then eventually the novel itself came out in England and the US, translated – though this of course could not be acknowledged – by Robert Kee from a French version of a screenplay written in English. The novelisation is an anomaly: an improvement on the original – no masterpiece, to be sure, but consistent and engaging, and with a certain emotional force. But Welles disowned it utterly. Mr Arkadin and everything connected with it was a sham and a disaster, and Welles generally preferred not to think about it. ‘My old dream of being able to make enough capital outside of America to pay my debts and get a fresh start before returning to residency there’, he wrote to Dolivet, ‘is completely shattered’, a remark which, as François Thomas has pointed out, is a very clear indication that Welles was not in Europe from choice, leading the carefree life of an independent film-maker. No: his eye was very clearly on America – which to all intents and purposes still meant Hollywood – where he could make films to a standard that would satisfy him.
Welles’s health was not good by 1955. His bulk was growing daily, with attendant ill-effects on his always troublesome joints and feet. During the rehearsal period Gareth Bogarde had arranged for a nurse to give him an injection every night ‘to get the excess fluid out of his body’, a somewhat doubtful prognosis; every morning, likewise, he had to be given another jab to get him on his feet. ‘He’d be rolling about on this collapsing bed,’ said Wolf Mankowitz, ‘with a sort of evil-looking “dead” face, a nurse hovering around with a huge syringe to give him this huge injection.’39 He took a wide range of medicaments – among them vitamin E- and B-complexes and cow urine – to counteract his many afflictions, which included severe asthma and frequent tonsillitis, neither of which would have been in any way assisted by his habit of puffing through a large box of Romeo y Julieta cigars every day.
His energy remained prodigious, renewed by occasional retreats to his bed – the real explanation of many of his mysterious absences. There he read, wrote, sketched, planned, staved off the world. Paola was his chief buffer against its depredations, but he needed a dedicated professional to organise him properly. Gareth Bogarde had been a stopgap who did his best; just before Moby-Dick opened, Oscar Lewenstein replaced him with a formidable woman who became, on and off, the lynchpin of his operation and, after his death, the fierce guardian of his reputation. Ann Rogers was nearly fifty, married with a young son; she had been born in America, then came to England, where she was brought up bilingually by her German stepfather. Before the war she ran her own translation agency in London, later monitoring the Italian Abyssinian invasion for the Foreign Office; afterwards she successfully set up the Promotion Department of the Times Literary Supplement and Times Educational Supplement and then joined forces with a leading theatrical publicity agency. And it was while she was working for this organisation that Oscar Lewenstein suggested she might like to help out with Welles. ‘She was a sort of “body” that we introduced to stand between Orson and us,’ said Wolf Mankowitz, ‘to take some of the blows.’40
Their encounter is revealing, firstly of the effect Welles had on people, but secondly of his modus operandi at the beginning of a relationship. He would throw down a gauntlet to test a person’s mettle, to try to ascertain whether he or she was worthy of his attention. Mrs Rogers met him at his hotel. He arrived deus ex machina. ‘He came down in the lift, alone. I thou
ght he was extraordinarily youthful looking and light on his feet. There’s this big man easily moving out of the little lift to me who was waiting for him on a bench and he said “Are you Mrs Rogers? I like you”. So I said “and I like you” which wasn’t like me at all: I didn’t usually show my hand so quickly. I loved the look of him. And he exuded . . . personality’s the only word to use but a magnetism. I was attached to him from then on.’ They took a taxi to the theatre; Welles asked her to get some copies of Antony and Cleopatra. When Mrs Rogers arrived at the theatre with them, Welles took her to his dressing room and told her that he was going to direct some half-hour television broadcasts of Shakespeare plays. Among the plays was Antony and Cleopatra. ‘I want you to cut out all the dead wood,’ he said, handing her a copy. And then, turning to leave, he said, ‘end on an up note’. ‘I thought, my God, who does he think I am?’ recalled Mrs Rogers. ‘But it was a test to see if he could faze me and to see how calm I would remain and I didn’t react at all. I just said “yes”.’ The following day he brought her some tape recordings he’d made in Vienna; half of them were in German. ‘And he said he didn’t know how I’d manage about that, I’d have to get somebody to translate. I said “I can do that”. He said “what?” I said “yes, I can do that” and I did. He would demand the impossible or ask you to get the impossible or to find the impossible and you did it. And I thought my poor old brain has never been so exercised before. Isn’t this wonderful, aren’t I lucky!’
He handed everything over to her:
He would look in these great big trouser pockets and have a handful of notes and would give them to me and say ‘get this, get that’ and I realised that he’d been doing that with other people before and he must have been defrauded and robbed or deceived and that was when I made up my mind that there was only one way to deal with him and that’s always to tell him the truth. Always to answer every question he asked me truthfully, which I did; sometimes about my husband and my family or about actors and actresses or what people had confided in me. It would be the truth without any opinion of mine and he knew that he could rely on me and be absolutely honest and then I could enjoy it and I did.
She made a number of very clear decisions at the beginning of their relationship, and abided by them to the end. She noted all outgoings and all money coming in and opened a Swiss bank account. ‘I made up my mind that there’s only one way to deal with him and that would be to be absolutely scrupulously honest and then I could sleep at night and I would have the advantage.’ Welles somehow understood this: he later described Mrs Rogers as someone who had made a conscious decision to be good – that she was one of the few people on earth who strove to be good. ‘I had to be. I don’t know where I would have been if I hadn’t been so straight.’ Goodness was, of course, a central concern of Welles’s, though his interest in evil may have had a slightly higher profile.
Mrs Rogers introduced a much sought-after element of structure and formality into a life that was largely without boundaries. ‘I reckoned I would not call him Orson until he asked me to and so therefore I wouldn’t ask him to call me anything else but Mrs Rogers. So Mrs Rogers it was.’ As she acknowledged to herself, she adored him, but she scrupulously observed the proprieties; and so her relationship with Welles lasted to the end, and well beyond: to the day she died. ‘In any other world I would, I suppose, and if I had been a different kind of person I could say I was in love with him, but I don’t think I was.’
Welles was utterly intrigued by her self-containment. ‘He just dug it up, my life. He would wander about in my bedroom when I wasn’t looking; our bedroom, my husband’s and my bedroom, taking in whether there were two single beds or a double bed.’ He asked her for the keys to her house when they went on a winter holiday. She said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t leave the keys with you because the insurance won’t permit it and my husband had said no, I mustn’t do so.’ To which Welles replied, ‘I don’t know how you ever came to marry that man. I think he’s a horrible man and I’m surprised that you should pay so much attention. After everything I have done for him.’ In fact it was Mrs Rogers who had made the decision about the house. ‘He had one of his crews in my garden at five o’clock one morning with all the equipment and they left the front door wide open in Warwick Avenue and went off while we were still asleep in our beds and that’s not good enough.’ She was one of the few people who ever said no to Welles and survived to tell the tale.41
So, with the parameters of the relationship firmly established, she set to work. Her immediate task after he had opened in Moby-Dick was to facilitate the two very promising projects he had in hand, both for television: the film of the play; and Around the World with Orson Welles, the documentary travel series for Associated-Rediffusion, which would launch Independent Television Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. Television loomed large in Welles’s life in 1955, or rather, it looked as if it would: the day Moby-Dick closed after its brief run, 9 July, the New York Times announced: ‘WELLES TO STAGE TV COLOR SERIES’.42 He would also, it reported, head all-star casts in CBS productions to begin in the autumn. ‘CBS confirms that Welles is signed to direct and star in a series of elaborate color television shows based on contemporary or classical plays and novels.’ Antony and Cleopatra was presumably to be one of the classical plays. But first up, the press release stated confidently, would be Trilby, with Welles as Svengali: back to the Higher Hokum again – nineteenth-century theatre at that, Welles’s comfort zone. Theodore Sills would be in charge of the series, which Harry Saltzman (later to distribute Chimes at Midnight) would produce. Not another word was heard of this immensely promising project. It seems that Welles was flirting with television, still not entirely clear as to how to position himself in relation to it. It was still generally regarded as an inferior, second-rate medium and would for some years continue to be; movies were the only serious activity for a grown-up film-maker. Welles partly shared that view, and partly sensed huge potential. But for what? When he finally came to terms with the medium, it would be with all his old freshness and zest. In 1949 Dick Wilson had advised him to cut his teeth on English television.43 Which, six years later, he did. Up to a point.
CHAPTER TEN
Around the World Again
AROUND THE World with Orson Welles was an inspired idea, or so it seemed. No one could have been better qualified to make such a series. Welles had already been Around the World, of course, once on stage and twice on radio, courtesy of Jules Verne. But in real life he was a born globetrotter: as a boy, he had very nearly put a girdle round the earth, as his alcoholic father’s travelling companion and occasional carer: they crossed Europe, passing through France, Spain, Germany and Hungary, and going as far as China and Japan; he sent vivacious reports back to a Ravinia newspaper. Dick Welles died when Welles was fifteen; only a year later he made his own way to Ireland, ostensibly to paint, but actually in the hope of finding work as an actor. Only a year later, after a brief spell back in Chicago, he took off again, once more on his own, to Morocco, where – he claimed – he enjoyed the hospitality of the legendary tribal chieftain known as the Glaoui, moving on to Spain and ending up in Seville, where he said he fought bulls.
Welles’s meteoric theatrical career then kept him in America till 1942, when, having made Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, he spent some months of that fateful year in Brazil, shooting what was intended to be a contribution to the US government’s South American wartime Good Neighborhood initiative. An insatiable xenophile, Welles had immediately fallen in love with the country and its history, shooting thousands and thousands of feet of film, covering the carnival in Rio and the poverty-stricken favelas, then moving to the sandy northern coastal city of Fortaleza. Welles was overwhelmed by the potential of the material he found all around him, and It’s All True, the film he tried to make there, spiralled out of control; he came home under a cloud which never entirely dispersed. Five years later he moved to Europe, moving constantly between Italy
, France, Spain and Germany, with extended visits to Britain. He was a citizen of the world as well as a film-maker of proven, if fitful, brilliance, and a series of travel documentaries written and directed by him is one of the best ideas British television ever had.
If the potential was limitless, the budget was not. The schedule proposed for Around the World with Orson Welles was very tight. The series would be co-produced by Filmorsa, because Welles, as we have seen, was under exclusive contract to them for three years. In the end it was Filmorsa and Dolivet (with whom Welles was scarcely on speaking terms) who put up most of the cash and took ultimate responsibility for delivering the films. Welles had a reasonable lead-time to prepare his thirteen half-hour documentaries, which were commissioned in January for transmission in September. He sketched out a number of fairly obvious initial possibilities: Rome, Paris, Madrid and (not taking his British audience very far round the world at all) London; Vienna, with its Harry Lime associations, chose itself. Welles quickly knocked off a few days’ filming there in February 1955 for an episode that he called ‘Revisiting Vienna’; it was the sound tapes from this that were the ones he handed to Ann Rogers at their first meeting.
Then, in mid-May, just after he had got married and just before rehearsals for Moby-Dick began, he embarked on something much more challenging: he had got wind of the retrial of a violently controversial case concerning a triple murder in rural France. In January 1953 the distinguished seventy-five-year-old British nutritionist Sir Jack Drummond, along with his wife Anne and his daughter Elizabeth, were camping in the hamlet of Lurs in south-eastern France when they were brutally murdered; a local farmer, Gaston Dominici, also seventy-five, confessed to the crime and was duly condemned to be guillotined. His story did not, however, add up in any way, and he later recanted his confession. A huge petition resulted in the reopening of the trial. The story had caused a particularly huge scandal in Britain: Jack Drummond was a very distinguished scientist, who had masterminded British nutritional policy during the war and was, at the time of his death, research director of that great national institution, Boots the Chemist. The subject was a perfect, sensational opening for Welles’s series of travelogues for Independent Television, a bold statement that would instantly dispel any sense that these were going to be harmless home movies.