by Simon Callow
You may imagine the effect of this gaunt, gauche, hollow-cheeked young man, in altogether the wrong sort of jacket, sitting among that well-groomed crowd, lecturing a popular idol of twenty-three on the effects of certain unsavoury juices upon horrible insane little girls, who wallowed in their own dung. Of course, she fell wildly, madly, head-over-heels in love with him, and before the month was out it was announced they were engaged to be married.
Welles’s interventions in the story are noteworthy. He makes the scientist considerably older than the starlet, which turns it into a slightly different story – a rather more conventional one, the revenge of an older man on the young, instead of a young man on his more beautiful contemporaries; he introduces the idea of the fountain of youth, along with a passing reference to Juan Ponce de Léon, who allegedly discovered Florida while looking for the mythic fountain; and – again perfectly wisely – he somewhat alters the narratorial tone to incorporate his own wry seen-it-all, man-of-the-world manner, which is rather different from Collier’s acidulousness. It is, after all, ‘Orson Welles speaking’, as he says at the beginning of the film:
How would you like to stay just as young as you are and not grow a day older for the next two hundred years? Oh, I’m not plugging some miracle new cosmetic. The question is actually faced by the three characters in our story, two men and a girl. The eternal triangle plus eternal youth add up to a whacky little romance which we’ll bring you, if we may, in just a few seconds.
It isn’t Collier – nothing whacky about his world – but it is vintage Welles, and irresistibly engaging, filled with all his plump, twinkling melancholy at the folly and sadness of human affairs. From the beginning, he plays delightfully with us and with the medium. He said of The Fountain of Youth that, of all his films, it is his only comedy. If not exactly that, then it is – along with F For Fake – his most playful, and playfulness is one of the essences of Welles that only gets an occasional look-in in his major films. It seems, on the strength of his work for British television and this little masterpiece, that he felt he could let his hair down in a medium that as yet had no classics, no real form, and could become whatever you wanted it to be. It is also worth noting that he had superb source material on which to draw.
Desilu provided him with excellent back-up, mostly drawn from the I Love Lucy team. The young Chilean art director Claudio Guzman provided him with the very simple settings that he needed: convinced that the medium could never match the cinema visually, he set out to create a sort of collage world of elements, a shorthand of location and mood, in which the story could move at the speed of light. The supervising editor, Dann Cahn, who had been part of Welles’s team on Macbeth ten years earlier, felt relaxed enough to be able make suggestions: a striking early shot of a light turning into the camera was his idea. As he had done on Kane and every other situation in which he felt relaxed, Welles happily gave permission to his collaborators to contribute ideas. Essentially, though, he had conceived the whole thing in his mind – the use of stills in the manner, as Ben Walters observes, of a photo-roman; the over-dubbing of his voice as the characters’ lips move, or alternatively their voices coming out of Welles’s lips: ‘oh,’ says Welles, but in Joi Lansing’s voice, ‘darling, what’s all this about eternal youth?’ The back-projection can suddenly transform a scene: Humphrey, newly returned from Vienna, stands at the dockside, the lights briefly go down to silhouette, and when they go up again he’s in a restaurant and the waiter is relieving him of his overcoat. Welles steps into the frame, almost rudely sometimes, blotting out the characters. There is a delectable lightness of touch to the whole thing, the only conceivable misjudgement a sequence when the starlet contemplates the phial before drinking it. Welles speaks some of the remarkable paragraph in which Collier describes her experience:
She stood and watched her reflection, and, in the stillness and silence of the apartment, she could feel and almost hear the remorseful erosion of time. Moment after moment, particles of skin wore away, hair follicles broke, splintered, and decayed, like the roots of dead trees. All those little tubes and miles of threadlike channels in the inner organs were silted up like doomed rivers. And the glands, the all-important glands were choking and clogging and falling apart. And she felt her marriage was falling apart, and Alan would be gone, and life would be gone.
In the film, as Welles speaks and Carolyn Coates looks into the mirror, she sees her face decay in a series of anatomical images. As realised, it seems a little schematic, almost like a PowerPoint presentation of decay; but the sequence still casts an authentically deathly chill over the otherwise merrily mordant proceedings. By all accounts, Welles had a delightful time during the brief four-day shoot. There was a composer-pianist on the set during the shoot and Welles would suggest a musical gesture, or a particular rhythm, to fit the scene; music too functions as a shorthand. When they recorded the soundtrack, Welles would propose certain instrumental effects. Whether this entirely justifies his credit as being responsible for ‘musical arrangement’ is uncertain.
The actors all give excellent accounts of themselves, especially perhaps Dan Tobin as the scientist, droll and steely; Joi Lansing, more often seen in a bikini than, as here, fully clad, lacks the carefree quality that Collier vividly describes, but is in every physical sense perfect for Welles’s purposes (on screen and off, apparently). Billy House, memorable in Welles’s The Stranger, makes a charming contribution; and the I Love Lucy regular Marjorie Bennett appears as a sort of conflation of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. The pulchritudinous Rick Jason (later to be famous as Platoon Leader Second Lieutenant Gil Hanley in the series Combat!) gives a striking account of Alan Brodie, the tennis champion, but his relationship with Welles was not the best: ‘Orson had, among other objectionable habits, a maddening one of walking away from you as you were in conversation with him,’ wrote Jason in his memoir, Scrapbooks of My Mind.
He’d talk to you over his shoulder and you found yourself trying to keep up with his stride as you spoke. One day he did it to me for the fourth or fifth time. I stopped, put two fingers in my mouth and let out a whistle that would frighten a banshee. He stopped, turned to me and said, ‘Something the matter? Spit it out.’ ‘When we’re conversing, will you kindly not walk away from me.’ Absently he said, ‘Was I doing that? Sorry.’ (He wasn’t sorry a bit.) He cleared his throat and said, ‘What is it you wanted?’ I stared at him. ‘Nothing,’ I said, turned and walked away.
But for the most part it was fun – the best fun Welles had had for a long time; the sort of fun he had been used to on the radio shows in the old Campbell Playhouse days, freewheeling, inventive, discovering ever more of the medium. Desi Arnaz gently made it clear to Welles that Desilu had no slack in their budgets: ‘Orson, I know that you are partly responsible for breaking RKO Studios. You went to Brazil to do a picture, shot a million feet of film and never made the picture, and you couldn’t have cared less. But I am not RKO. This is my Babalu money, so don’t you fuck around with it.’8 Thereafter Arnaz maintained a respectful distance as producer. Welles duly came in on schedule and only $5,000 over budget, and everyone who saw the film adored it, including the network executives who had it in their power to buy it, and indeed to authorise more episodes; at the end of The Fountain of Youth, indeed, Welles promises a second film – Green Thoughts, also adapted from Collier, a ‘spook story’, says Welles, of ‘a man-eating Tiger Orchid’.
It never happened. Arnaz and company had overestimated the networks’ stomach for risk of any kind. According to Weitzman, though they liked the film, they and the advertising agencies refused to believe that Welles could duplicate its success, especially on a weekly basis:
They’d say, ‘Mm, you know, we’d love to have it if it was somebody other than Orson Welles. He doesn’t know much about television, and we don’t really trust him. He didn’t pay his taxes, they shipped him out of the country, and what did he do when he was in Europe? He did a couple of thin
gs, but nothing comparable to Citizen Kane.’9
Television was indeed, just as Welles had told Ed Murrow, already ossifying in its infancy. NBC’s daringly highbrow president, Sylvester Weaver, was ousted in favour of a successor who proudly espoused ‘what we call a schedule of meat-and-potatoes’. For Welles, it was Groundhog Day again: he had been here before, with Charles Koerner at RKO fifteen years earlier, trumpeting his notorious watchword: ‘Showmanship before genius’ – though, God knows, Welles had nothing against showmanship; indeed, The Fountain of Youth was a fine example of it. When it was finally transmitted, two years later, as part of NBC’s Colgate Theatre – a one-off series of unaired pilot programmes rushed in to replace the allegedly rigged game show Dotto – it was scarcely accompanied by fanfares, though the preview in the New York World-Telegram and Sun said that ‘once you’ve seen it, you’ll know why it was never bought. It’s too daring, imaginative and funny to be confused with the stodgy fare they think TV audiences want.’ The review the following morning had the simple headline: ‘ORSON WELLES, TV NEEDS YOU’:
Mr Welles may, as his detractors say, be the prime ham of the Western world. He may also be a snob, a spendthrift and a poseur. His temper may be terrible, his self-infatuation hopeless. But his presence on the home screen last night projected excitement, gaiety and a note of quality that’s most rare for these times.
In a summer, the reviewers says, that had ‘all the excitement of a rummage sale’, Welles’s ‘small caprice’ was all the more to be treasured. ‘It has humor. It had bold and unusual techniques. And it had great charm. Heavens, it even had a moral . . . now why can’t we see Mr Welles every week?’10 Remarkably, the programme won the prestigious Peabody Award, based at the University of Georgia; and the citation, spoken by the publisher and humourist Bennett Cerf, sums up the film eloquently and precisely: ‘To Orson Welles, for the wit, originality, and insouciance of The Fountain Of Youth, NBC, one of the merriest, most irreverent half-hours of the year 1958, this special Peabody Award is given.’
The Award was too little and too late to influence Welles’s career in television. If, in 1958, American television needed him, in time he came to need it much more: to the day he died, he pursued it ardently, abjectly and with scant reciprocation. By 1958, when he might have made a difference, each of the opportunities that could have led to something in the new medium – Omnibus, the CBS spectaculars, Desilu’s projected anthology series – had come to nothing, due to a familiar combination of Welles’s reputation, his obstinacy and his elusiveness. He did, in fact, make one further foray into American television, which manifested all of these elements. It was shot in 1957, to a commission from ABC’s Jim Aubrey, as part of a planned weekly series, for which he was to be paid $200,000. Welles was slow to deliver, however. Aubrey told Arnaz that he would have to go out to Italy to track him down. ‘I wondered how soon it would be before you had to go to Italy,’ said Arnaz. ‘How much has Orson spent already?’ ‘Over two hundred thousand dollars and we haven’t seen one fucking foot of film yet.’ Aubrey went to Italy. About three weeks later he came back. ‘What happened in Italy?’ asked Arnaz. ‘Can you believe this?’ said Aubrey. ‘He wouldn’t even see me.’11 Eventually the first episode of the projected series, variously entitled Portrait of Gina or Viva Italia, was delivered, but immediately rejected. Leonard Goldenson, Aubrey’s superior, described it as ‘very poorly done’ and ‘little more than a home movie’, and returned it to Welles, who dragged the cans around Europe with him for a while, finally leaving them behind in a hotel room in the Ritz Hotel in Paris, where they repined in the lost and found department till the early 1980s.
Welles’s desire to rid himself of the film is understandable. It recycles all the familiar tropes of his documentary style, but this time around with neither charm nor inventiveness. Even his own persona, such a reliable standby in a crisis, falls flat. He seems to have an underlying point to make, which is about the ingratitude of the Italians, something from which he undoubtedly felt he had suffered, but it makes for a very curmudgeonly interlocutor. Seen in the twenty-first century, the film also suffers from a drooling heavy-breathing commentary on ‘the ladies of Italy’, as the camera roams over various posters and paintings featuring parts of their semi-clothed anatomies. In fact the tone of the piece is that of a gossip column, underlined by an over-vivacious score consisting of every notable piece of Italian music from Rossini to ‘Funiculì, Funiculà’, although from time to time, for no discernible reason, Harry Lime’s zither-theme makes an appearance. The Italian-bashing starts in earnest pretty quickly: Welles tells us that Rossano Brazzi (the biggest Italian star of the day internationally) isn’t disliked in Italy, but he certainly isn’t adored there; Brazzi concurs wryly, noting that the greatest of all Italian actresses, Eleanora Duse – worshipped everywhere else in the world – played to half-empty houses in her native land. And Caruso said he’d die in Italy, but never sing there. And so it goes on. Paola Mori is roped in to tell us that Italians don’t like going to see shows: they prefer to make a show of themselves. Welles interviews Vittorio De Sica – ‘one of the few directors in Italy who deserves to be called great’ – who tells us that his films are always flops in Italy.
Welles sets off for Subiaco, where Gina Lollobrigida – the ostensible subject of the film – was born. The people of Subiaco aren’t proud of her success, we learn; in fact they’re not very nice people at all. A pen pal of Gina’s is located; from her we discover that, as a child, Gina was unhappy, had few friends and couldn’t get away quickly enough. ‘Fifteen hundred years ago,’ says Welles, ‘history took leave of Subiaco, never to return: we’ll take our cue from history. And from Gina – she left town in a hurry: let’s follow suit.’ Finally we meet her. It was her first appearance on television; quite a coup. She is ravishing to behold, but evidently furious about many things: the newspapers, the public, the government. ‘What do the papers do to destroy you?’ prompts Welles. ‘EVERYTHING!’ she cries back. ‘Why are people so nasty to you?’ She shrugs: ‘Italy is a strange country.’ ‘A strange country,’ repeats Welles, adding, with patent insincerity, ‘but adorable – the people are adorable.’ And he bids us farewell (for once not obediently ours) with the word ciao. ‘Ciao for now.’ It was ciao for good for the series.
The programme is a remarkable and unusual example of Welles unadrenalised, unable to summon up any enthusiasm for the task in hand. The camera work is absolutely routine; he can’t even get animated by the idea of playing ‘Orson Welles’. The programme bears the same relationship to his better television work as Mr Arkadin does to Citizen Kane; its feebleness is all the more astonishing in such close proximity to The Fountain of Youth. It closed the last door on any fruitful relationship that he might have had with American television.
While Welles was working for Desilu, two years earlier, he had, at his own suggestion, stayed with the Arnazes in Hollywood: not a happy time for them. He remained there for ten weeks, ‘but it seemed like ten years’, according to Lucille Ball. He occupied the guest house, but regarded the rest of the house as an annexe to it. ‘He had the servants hopping,’ she told her neighbour, Jim Brochu, who wrote it all down. ‘He’d walk in the living room, all in black with his big cigar blowing, and scare the hell out of the kids. I heard Little Desi crying one afternoon, and I thought, “Orson’s home.”’12
Ball was not the first person to find Welles reminding her of Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner. She claimed, half-seriously, that in order to get him out of the house she invited him to do an episode of I Love Lucy, which he duly did. The premise of ‘Lucy Meets Orson Welles’ goes back as far as the Orson Welles Almanac Shows – further, in fact, right back to Welles standing in for Jack Benny on Benny’s own show: as in I Love Lucy, he gave his much-recycled performance of himself as a disdainful Great Thespian – a performance he was not entirely averse to giving in real life. In this case, ‘Orson Welles’ is in need of an assistant f
or his magic act and asks Ricky if Lucy will oblige. She, meanwhile, assumes that, on the strength of her unforgettable Juliet at school, Welles wants her to perform Shakespeare with him. After much toing and froing she does end up, of course, assisting him in his magic act – though not before he has given her and Ricky a glimpse of his genius as a Shakespearean, in a heavily rhetorical account of Romeo’s soliloquy in Juliet’s tomb in the last act of the play, ‘Ah, dear Juliet, why art thou yet so fair?’ Ricky and Lucy are duly awed, after which the plot then limply climaxes with the magic act, in which Lucy assists Welles in the same Broom Suspension effect he had just successfully performed in Las Vegas.
The act requires a great deal from the assistant, as it happens, including considerable powers of abdominal control; this had not been explained to Lucy. It was, she told Brichu, the most painful experience of her life, worse than childbirth. ‘It felt like the broom was up my ass, and I had to stay on the goddamned thing for at least five minutes,’ which lends a certain retrospective poignancy to Welles’s line ‘The Princess will feel nothing!’ and an unmistakable urgency to Lucy’s last line: ‘Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo? Romeo, get me down from here.’ The show was, she told Brichu, ‘a stinker’, and it is hard to disagree. For all Welles’s longing to be part of the world of comedy (attempts to do so would recur almost to his dying day), it is not where he belongs; or perhaps, to be more precise, he never found a comic persona that could integrate with anyone else.