by Simon Callow
Welles’s feelings for his other surrogate father, Roger – ‘Skipper’ – Hill, his former headmaster, and the man he always described as having saved him, were far simpler. With his belief that you would only learn from the things you loved doing, Skipper had much more in common with Welles’s happy-go-lucky natural father Dick. Welles’s relationship with Skipper was utterly straightforward (though Welles once naughtily told him at a public symposium in Los Angeles that ‘I was the boy you could have had’). No, they simply loved each other, sustaining each other over the years via long and affectionate telephone calls from wherever in the world Welles might be; this continued till Welles’s death. Though Skipper had a high appreciation of Welles’s worth, and was full of dreams for the great good that he could do in the world, there was no attempt to pressure him into being professionally ambitious, just simple celebration of his gifts and his achievements. For his part, Welles saw Skipper as a model, a perfectly balanced man, productive, wise and generous; the marriage between Skipper and his wife Hortense was, to Welles, the beau idéal of what relationships between men and women should be. They were his family, a source of stability to which he regularly addressed himself.
As for Dick Welles, Welles romanced him into being a dreamer, an inventor, the intimate of artists and statesmen, a man born out of his time – ‘My Father Wore Black Spats’ is the title of the piece Welles wrote about him in Vogue magazine – but in reality, after his early retirement, he became a full-time hedonist, deeply devoted to the pursuit of pleasure. He gave Welles an education in the pleasures of life – food, drink, travel, girls, entertainment – and loved his boy unconditionally. But his love was not sufficient for Welles, who banished him.
For a while, after the death of Welles’s mother Beatrice, and before Dick’s gin-sodden demise, these three men – Dadda, Skipper and Dick – took joint responsibility for Welles. It was the formative period of his life, setting up the tensions and contradictions of his future. The feelings he had for these three very different fathers were at the core of his being, and although he always disavowed any autobiographical element in his work, in Chimes at Midnight it is unavoidably present.
The screenplay completed, Welles was ready to go, firing on all cylinders. Then a small dark cloud on the distant horizon suddenly loomed very large, threatening to engulf the project. Mr Arkadin had had a disastrous commercial history in Spain and in Britain, where, in a version without flashbacks, it had changed its name to Confidential Report; it another version it had been seen, without great enthusiasm, in Cannes and in Germany. As far as America was concerned, the putative distribution company gave up trying to release the film there. In the wake of that failure, in September 1961 Louis Dolivet, or rather Filmorsa, had filed a suit against Welles for breach of contract and unprofessional behaviour, including ‘unskilful and inefficient performance of duties’ during filming:
Defendant attended night clubs almost every night and consistently reported late for work. This caused regular shooting schedules to be abandoned. The defendant did not restrict his drinking to night clubs. On a number of occasions he appeared on the set in an intoxicated condition and on some occasions brought liquor with him onto the set.1
The damages claimed were $750,000. Welles rebutted the charges, claiming they employed ‘blunderbuss, catch-all phraseology, naked generalizations, unsupported inferences and patent irrelevancies’. The case rumbled on inconclusively. Finally, in October 1962, the film reached America, in a provisional version that closed almost as soon as it had opened. There was a legal lull, and then in June 1964 a pre-trial hearing of Filmorsa v. Orson Welles was announced. The case, already widely reported in the newspapers,2 wasn’t going to go away. The consequences of this were likely to be disastrous for Welles.
On 2 September, 1964, two weeks before Welles began to shoot Chimes at Midnight, he wrote Dolivet an abject letter. ‘Dear Louis,’ it began, ‘this is written to a very successful man by one who is close to being a failure.’ He reviewed his melancholy situation, earning his living as an actor, doing only what he calls ‘occasional bits’, the special appearances of which he reckons he has played four in the previous ten years. His last full-length part was in 1959 (in Compulsion). But acting is not his proper job. ‘I call myself a director.’ As a director he has directed only two pictures since 1954, an average, he notes, of one picture every five years. “I’m hanging on by my fingers, and I don’t think I could survive another failure,” he says. “If I had to return to New York I would fall into their hands; there would be no escape.”
He tells Dolivet that he is – ‘frankly’ – desperate. ‘The slightest bad publicity – the vaguest hint of trouble in America’ – will wreck the Spanish picture deal that has taken so long to put together.
At my age – and with all the years of failure behind me – this could well be my last real chance. Louis, if you don’t call it off this lawsuit will ruin me.
All begging letters, he says, are shameless, so he regrets that he has to invoke the name of their old, close friendship. ‘I do wish,’ he ends, ‘that I were the one who could give proof of the loyalty of an old friendship, instead of having to ask for it.’
It worked; Dolivet must have been touched by Welles’s letter, or perhaps he felt that, finally, he had made his point. On 10 September he replied to Welles to tell him that he would call off the lawsuit; the next day, Dolivet wrote to his lawyers to that effect. Welles generally preferred not to talk about Mr Arkadin; sad though its failure was, perhaps even sadder from Welles’s point of view was the failure of his relationship with Dolivet, who, having known nothing about film production before he met Welles, had gone on, very successfully, to produce Jacques Tati’s inspired Mon Oncle. Welles had been perfectly happy to accept Dolivet as his political mentor, but could not tolerate him as his producer. Another road not taken; another potential partnership bust. Meanwhile, Chimes at Midnight was safe.
*
The screenplay with which they started filming in October 1964 was a distillation of everything Welles had learned about the plays and about the characters over the years, but it had taken on a new colour. The final version of Chimes at Midnight on stage in Dublin traced the arc of Henry IV, Parts One and Two: Act One moving from the explosive energy of the angry barons, through the chivalric splendour of Hotspur’s challenge and culminating in the King’s mastery of the situation, as Falstaff and Hal dance the antic hay; Act Two, by contrast, showing the slow physical decline of both Falstaff and the King, as the political situation becomes ever more mired in a brutal war of attrition, until Hal is finally ready to rule as Henry V. The stage show concluded, as the film does, with the scene from Henry V in which Falstaff’s followers ponder his death, and the death of everything he represented. Welles’s screenplay begins, not with death itself, but with intimations of mortality, a sequence that sets the tone for the entire film. It features a snippet from a scene in Part Two of Henry IV in which three very old gentlemen, Justices Shallow and Silence and Sir John Falstaff, pad through the snow, ruminating as they go on the passing of time. Falstaff, in particular, descends into a pit of melancholy, the word ‘old’ tolling mournfully through the scene: ‘Old, old, Master Shallow.’ Welles speaks the title-line of the film – ‘we have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow’ – in no spirit of nostalgia, but as if describing funeral bells.
It is a remarkable start to the film, effective and affecting, and it is very different from the dynamic way in which both Five Kings and the Irish Chimes at Midnight had begun. It starts with a dying fall, swiftly succeeded in the screenplay by the braying of trumpets and the thunder of hooves, but from the very start it sets a potent tone of lament, and – joyous though the film often is – it is the lamentation that lingers. This will be a film about age and about loss and about the passage of time. It is noteworthy that Welles sets it in winter, to compound all these things: Shakespeare’s scene is set in high summer (‘it i
s hot, Master Shallow’). In Dublin they had tried many alternative openings, including beginning with the scene that ends the film, ‘Falstaff is dead . . . the king has killed his heart.’ Had Welles started the film that way, it would have had Wellesian form: both Kane and Othello start at the end, as, arguably, does Mr Arkadin. But opening with Falstaff’s death would have made the film all about Falstaff; as it stands, it is about much bigger things than the death of one man. The stage version was skilfully but linearly done, with due respect for Shakespeare’s progression of the action. In the screenplay Welles goes to work with a vengeance with the scissors and paste, snipping a line here and a line there, redistributing speeches, conflating characters, taking Parts One and Two of the play and shuffling them up like a deck of cards; it is quite brilliantly done, a collage of genius, kaleidoscopic in its portrayal of the characters, their world and the actions in which they are involved; with his strong musical instinct, Welles rearranges the text into an endlessly varying pattern of ensembles, arias, duets, trios and quartets, which form a through-composed whole. It is also quintessentially filmic, never still, ever-moving, breathing, changing direction.
For it to work, Welles needed skilled, nimble, flexible actors, and he could scarcely have improved the cast he had assembled. Securing John Gielgud was a great coup, though in fact his career on stage was at something of a low ebb, and his film career had not yet fully established itself. Two years earlier he had had a spectacular flop on stage as Othello, in an over-designed and under-imagined production by Franco Zeffirelli; on the other hand, his one-man show The Ages of Man had confirmed him, if any confirmation were needed, as the outstanding living speaker of Shakespeare. What people were perhaps beginning to forget was the brilliance of his conception and interpretation of character – his Hamlet, Cassius, Prospero, Lear, Angelo, Richard II, to name a handful, were all as psychologically acute as they were beautifully spoken. Henry IV, line for line and scene for scene, is one of the greatest of Shakespearean roles, but it is rarely attempted by a great actor because the King disappears from the play for long sections of the action; this is to be regretted, because the success of the play (and the success of Welles’s screenplay) is entirely dependent on the three-way transaction between King, Hal and Falstaff; if the King is dull or blustery or commonplace, there is no contest and it is impossible to rejoice at Hal’s growth to authority. Gielgud inhabits the part with a seething inner energy, extraordinary emotional intensity and a flawless command of the King’s volatility; it was – of all people – Lee Strasberg, high priest of the Method, evangelist of content over form, who said that when he saw Gielgud acting, he heard Shakespeare think; and if ever a demonstration of this uncommon capacity were required, here it is, preserved for all time. Indeed, one has the unnerving sensation that he might be making it up. But he isn’t; every word, every syllable is perfectly placed. On his first day of filming Gielgud was called on to speak the famous speech that ends ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown’ in a single shot, on two cameras, which he did on the first take and without rehearsals, crying out triumphantly, ‘I said all the words in the right order!’
Hal, of course, was Keith Baxter, whose irresistible élan is utterly natural and spontaneous, and his Celtic relish of language delicious; but the watchful, mindful brain is always there at work, underneath all the youthful charm. The deep brilliance of the performance is rooted in his off-screen relationship with his two fathers in the film. Baxter idolised Gielgud as an actor, and their dealings with each other on screen are coloured by that: Gielgud is Baxter’s father-in-acting, and this informs Hal’s growing understanding and admiration of his father’s qualities; he hangs on his every word. With Falstaff, his experience of playing the role on stage with Welles, and their private friendship, give Baxter great freedom with him, both physically and mentally. The playfulness and tactility are clearly liberating for Welles too, who is rarely seen getting involved in actual bodily contact with male actors: here the horseplay and the sheer affection are human, warm, unforced, and the rejection of Falstaff palpably upsetting, both for Hal and for Baxter. Occasionally, off-screen or off-stage factors colour a performance, not necessarily for the better; in this case they immeasurably enrich the film. The tug-of-war between the central trio is manifest.
For the rest, Welles gathered around him a choice selection of actors who were both vivid and experienced and created amongst themselves, however briefly they might have been on board, a sense of company: Alan Webb, whom Welles had directed in Rhinoceros, was a reedy, sharp-nosed Shallow; Norman Rodway, a brilliant new young Irish actor, witty and eruptive as Hotspur; Michael Aldridge, a West End stalwart, displayed unexpected fantasy and extravagance as Pistol; Tony Beckley, straight from the nascent RSC, was dark and sour as Poins; Andrew Faulds, soon to be a Labour MP, played the part of the Earl of Westmoreland, to which he brought the vigour and barely masked aggression that his opponents in the House of Commons later came to fear. Then there was Jeanne Moreau, enchanted by Welles, as were some women whom he didn’t personally desire – Marlene Dietrich was another – here seemingly much more at ease than in The Trial, a credible and genuinely sexy tart at the Boar’s Head, deeply touching in her devotion to Falstaff; and Margaret Rutherford as Mistress Quickly, as unlikely a whore-mistress as could be found on the face of the planet, and one, moreover, endowed with an inexplicable and freely roaming Irish accent, but who is somehow perfectly and properly at home in Welles’s Merrie England.
Two of the aristocracy were played by Spaniards, and Hotspur’s Welsh wife was Franco-Russian (Marina Vlady, very successfully dubbed). Falstaff’s witty little page was Welles’s nine-year-old daughter, Beatrice. Apart from Baxter, the only other survivor from the Irish Chimes at Midnight was Paddy Bedford, nominally playing Bardolph, but disappointingly without Bardolph’s single most notable characteristic, his incandescent nose. A final piece of casting was Hilton Edwards as Justice Silence. Right at the beginning of shooting, Edwards succumbed to influenza and begged to be allowed to withdraw from the film, to which Welles agreed without argument, no doubt conscious that his reasons for wanting to be released were as much emotional as physical: nothing had been resolved between Welles and his old colleagues on the financial front, and a bad taste still lingered. MacLiammóir, in particular, was implacable, despite the transformation of his professional life and financial situation with the triumphant premiere, just six months after the end of the run of Chimes at Midnight, of his one-man show, The Importance of Being Oscar, directed by Edwards, which became a huge international hit. Dublin Gate Productions, of which Welles was still theoretically a board member, was now solvent at last, but Orson Welles was no part of its plan for the future.
When Edwards left the film, a panic to cast Silence then ensued. Marlene Dietrich was roped in to find someone from among her vast acquaintance, but she failed to come up with anyone; then Welles had a sudden inspiration: the distinguished Anglo-American actor Ernest Milton, acclaimed as the Hamlet of his generation and now, at seventy-five, in semi-retirement.3 Somehow Welles got hold of his number and booked a call to England; he and his fellow-actors, according to Michael Aldridge, gathered around the phone in the local Spanish post office until eventually they heard Milton’s telephone being lifted. ‘I have a person-to-person call for Mr Ernest Milton from Mr Orson Welles in Spain,’ said the operator. There was a pause. Then they heard Milton’s extraordinary fluting voice: ‘I don’t want to speak to him,’ after which the receiver went down.4 The explanation for this brush-off lies in a now quite widely circulated BBC interview on the subject of Hamlet, which Welles had given a year earlier to the ever-supportive Huw Wheldon.5 It was a three-way conversation between Welles, Peter O’Toole (who was then playing the part at the new National Theatre) and, theoretically, Milton. O’Toole and Welles hit it off wonderfully, roaring appreciatively at each other’s gags and nodding sagely at each other’s aperçus and barely acknowledging Milton’s existence, when he attempt
ed to express his reflections on a lifetime’s experience of doing the play. His observations, full of poetic locutions and quivering sensibility, must indeed have seemed hopelessly old-fashioned to O’Toole and Welles in 1963; but heard now, they have a fragile imaginative intensity which you would have to go many miles to see on any stage today. Milton looks increasingly battered by the discourtesy of his fellow-actors; Welles, in particular, keeps his shoulder firmly turned away from him. This was so striking that there was critical comment the following day from television reviewers. It would seem that Welles was simply over-excited by the youthful O’Toole; he was now more and more engaged by the rising generation of actors, keen to work with them, to be associated with them. Despite his bulk, he was feeling revitalised, his appetite for directing and acting renewed. Hope was in the air.
Whatever the reason for the brush-off, the result was that the world was denied Ernest Milton’s Silence. Prompted by Paola, Welles eventually offered the part to the very high-profile Italian actor Walter Chiari – leading light of the dolce vita crowd in Rome, erstwhile star of Bonjour Tristesse and The Little Hut, lover of Ava Gardner and fluent and witty English-speaker. Welles seems to have taken against him immediately, until one lunchtime Chiari told a story featuring a man with a stutter. Welles immediately saw the possibilities of the stutter for Silence; thereafter Chiari never finished a line in the part – a brilliant idea that brings forth an exquisitely lugubrious performance from him, a man doomed to be unheard.