Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1

by Barton Whaley

  Higham, Callow, and Thomson give us many fresh and welcome details along the way. Unfortunately each writer ends having constructed a monstrous puppet who is much less than the sum of Orson's many parts. Like Pauline Kael (see Appendix “When the Credits Roll”), they set themselves up as prosecuting attorneys who, having decided their suspect is guilty, proceed to marshal every scrap of evidence pointing to guilt and ignoring any pieces that are exculpatory. Fair enough in a courtroom where prosecutors can be challenged by lawyers and witnesses for the defense. But unfair in a biographical book where every trick of rhetoric and deceptive concealment of evidence is possible. Unfair to subject and reader alike.

  The fair method found in most time-tested biographies and histories begins with an honest question, one that isn’t already loaded. For example: Did Orson’s career really decline after Citizen Kane? Or, better yet: What was the trajectory of Orson’s career and what factors account for it? Not, why didn't Orson Welles accomplish more with his life? That’s presumption at its worst.

  To sharpen my point let’s try a couple of thought experiments. Ask the question, What went wrong with _____ [fill in a name]? Hemingway jumps to mind. A writer from a dysfunctional family who peaked early and then slipped downhill to become a caricature of himself. OK, but the parallels with Orson end there. Hem traveled different roads in both career and mind. We could also try filling in such early alleged burn-outs as Clifford Odets or J. D. Salinger or even Joseph Heller.

  My final example will be another maverick whose enormous creativity peaked between ages 26 and 31 and then drifted for 44 years on old fame that, like Hemingway’s, included a Nobel Prize. OK, so why doesn't anybody ask what went wrong with Albert Einstein. The question that interests all his biographers and readers is What went right?

  Having selected a fair question, the biographer must then gather all evidence relevant to that question. He may not discard any piece that doesn’t fit his preconceptions. Such puzzle pieces should at least be acknowledged in footnotes. This is what I’ve attempted.

  Although Welles is the main subject or major figure in hundreds of books and articles, only a few mention – and then merely in passing – the role of magic in his personal or professional life. The stage, radio, and film critics, historians, and biographers tend to dismiss it as a “hobby" or “only a diversion". Not understanding the special psychology of either conjuring or that of the conjuror, they researched, interviewed, and wrote as if only the “high" art forms of the theater or cinema mattered to him, which presumably gave us all we need to know to understand both the man and his creations. With a single exception, none of these writers had even bothered to correctly spell the names of his behind-the-scenes magic assistants, much less researched the tricks themselves or even asked his views on magic and illusion. Yet these seemingly trivial details give the key that unlocks and discovers an unsuspected self; although it was one he'd never tried to hide, particularly not from close friends. Indeed, whenever he did try to tell people who he really was, all except other sorcerers assumed he was just being frivolous.

  Magic held a life-long fascination for Orson Welles. It directly and deeply influenced much of his creative work as an actor, writer, and director in stage, radio, film, TV, opera, and ballet. It also reveals a playful side of the man. He even applied the psychological principles of conjuring to defeat enemies, win friends, and attract women. Magic specifically and deception in general were central factors driving and molding his life and his many other creations.

  All successful magicians understand the psychology of deception. But what precisely is deception? It’s one of those slippery words that each of us knows what it means – until we try to talk about it with another person. I define deception as any attempt – by words or actions – intended to distort another person’s or group’s perception of reality. This definition avoids confusion with mere misinformation, incomplete information, or the truth value of statements. But it does permit us to include the authorized lies and deceptions practiced with our knowledge and approval by stage actors, magicians, and poker players.

  Deception is part of the human condition, a form of social behavior that is evidently passed on, probably even partly inherited, from our pre-human ancestors. It has likely always been with us, is certainly with us today, and will remain as long as one person seeks unfair advantage over another. Each of us has had to deal with it at various times in our lives, many as deceivers, all as victims. Like lying. A lie, we would all agree, is a form of deception. But many will insist they are not liars because they speak no falsehood – not, mind you, “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”, but some narrowly and privately edited version of it. They reason that, because they are honest folk like the mythic young George Washington, they “cannot tell a lie”. And their excuse is that, anyway, it’s only “tactful” or a “white lie” or “only a lie of omission”. Even truth is sometimes the best lie – for the person who has a reputation for lying. Welles, having mastered the social psychology of deception, became a master – as sorcerer, practical joker, forger, con artist, and an unusually canny manipulator of the people in his career and personal life. It even set the pattern for his fabulous story telling, in structure and well as content. Knowing this secret side and how it works, we can better understand both who he was and why and how he dealt with others in the very odd ways he did – always surprising and often delighting them. And never quite losing his infectious grin.

  Although a voracious reader, there's no hard evidence that Orson had read any of the works of Florentine Renaissance politician-historian-dramatist Niccolò Machiavelli prior to adulthood.1 He didn't need to – he’d learned the principles at an early age. Machiavelli got a bum rap 52 years after his death in 1527 when “Machiavellian" was coined to refer to the political philosophy that advocates deception and guile as the most effective way to win in the great game of power politics. Fine, except for the advocacy. In fact he’d written The Prince as satire, an exposé to enlighten and thereby give back some power to the victims of tyrants to help them better defend against deception. It wasn’t written to teach deception to the great Medici lord to whom he had dedicated his masterpiece, the tyrant who had seized his beloved Florentine Republic and had him thrice tortured on the rack. The florid dedication was facetious – the author hadn't even bothered to send Giuliano de Medici a copy.2

  Most socially and politically naive adults share the misconception that deception – of whatever kind – is a complicated activity. They quote Sir Walter Scott's lines about the “tangled web" of deceit as if they were gospel. When back in 1805 Scott bemoaned “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, / When first we practise to deceive!" the romantic British knight expressed a belief widely held among Anglo-Saxons that deception is a convoluted business. And so it is – in the tangled minds of people who insist on making the simple difficult. Even some of my former colleagues in military deception and counterintelligence prefer to pursue inscrutable models of deception. Obviously, from the planning and outcome of Operation Desert Storm, one amateur magician named Norman Schwartzkopf didn't.

  To deceive, to play any trick, one need only hide something real while showing in its place something false but plausible. Regardless of their social or technological context, this method is used by all deceivers – whether in magical effects, theatrical or cinematic illusions, politics or war, or in con games, hoaxes, in all jokes including practical jokes, literary and art forgeries, and finally those discreet but hypocritical lies we label “white" or “tactful". Each of these types of deception tries to dissimulate one truth while simultaneously simulating a substitute “truth".3 If the attempt succeeds, the target is duped. It's that simple. Orson understood and, like all masters of the art, kept his various deceptions simple. Those overly clever deceivers who design elaborate games only increase their risk of detection because the more complicated the ruse, the more clues – each inviting the intended victim to discover the solution. Magicians call t
hese clues “discrepancies" and even the most elegant attempts to deceive will have at least two – one real thing hidden, one false thing substituted.4 So the most effective deceptions cut the discrepancies to the minimum and then make every effort to disguise the two or more that remain.

  1 In 1939 Welles contemplated directing and starring in a movie titled The Life of Machiavelli and read over several books on the Italian Renaissance. When he went to Italy in 1947 he evidently read further into the subject.

  2Garrett Mattingly, "Machiavelli's Prince: Political Science or Political Satire?", The American Scholar, Vol.XXVII (1958), 482-491. While it is admittedly impossible to prove a negative, the fact that the "gift" manuscript volume is unrecorded in the meticulous records of the Laurentian Library is strong evidence of its phantom nature.

  3Barton Whaley, "Toward a General Theory of Deception", The Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol.5, No.1 (March 1982), 178-192; reprinted in Epoptica: A Review of Current Magic Literature and Apparatus #5 (January 1984), 270-277.

  4R. V. Jones, "The Theory of Practical Joking – Its Relevance to Physics", Bulletin of the Institute of Physics (June 1957), 193-201. A minor revision is "The Theory of Practical Joking – An Elaboration", Bulletin of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, Vol.11, No.1/2 (January/February, 1975), 10-17. Dr. Jones is a leading military deception planner, experimental physicist, and practical joker

  – three activities that he links by theory in this important paper. A revised version is Jones (1975). A good general study of deception theory is Jason Randal, Ph.D, The Psychology of Deception: Why Magic Works (Venice, California: Top Secret Productions, Inc., (continued...)

  Orson Welles was a magician, and it’s the magician’s talent to confront people with an ever-unexpected and surprising Third Option. This is an odd choice that few others can fully understand even afterwards. Conjurers are masters of options because every magical effect can in theory be achieved by more than one method. Thus at least three quite different methods each have been used for Sawing a Woman in Half or Catching a Bullet or Levitating a Lady, all illusions that Orson already understood and would one day himself perform. The fact that any one of several methods, sometimes dozens, can lurk behind any specific effect makes it all the more difficult for the audience (even other magicians) to detect the very natural cause of each of these seemingly supernatural happenings.

  I began this book on 29 March 1991. It was later than I thought. More than 100 persons who might have clarified certain details had already been led into the beyond by Orson's symbolic Roman god Mercury. Another 17 died before I could reach them. Fortunately many had left autobiographies or interviews or letters that answered most of my questions. My wishlist of survivors and experts grew to 331.

  My thanks to the 241 individuals who responded are so extensive that I've acknowledged them by name in an end piece. Only 17 had been interviewed by any of Welles' previous BEEographers, as he called them.5 This reflects the fact that their interests differed from mine and not on their research, which was, collectively, enormous. The main value in interviewing so many people isn't merely to capture yet another anecdote but to double, triple, or sometimes even quadruple-check the fallibility of memories – a labored process that drew many delightfully unexpected responses and solved several old puzzles.

  Early on I felt like the reporter sent to interview Citizen Kane's associates to uncover the man behind the mask and receive different views from each. But it soon became evident that the varied impressions of Orson Welles depended on the specific relationship he'd created with each person. Like Kane he wore several masks. Unlike Kane he controlled which one he would don for which person or group. This accounts in large part for the several different, almost Rashomon-like vignettes given of Orson by various people. However this tangled portrait quickly unravels when we sort the witnesses into five batches:

  4 (...continued)

  1982, 209pp).

  5The interviewers and their interviewees (naming but not counting the duplicates) were: PETER NOBLE: Ray Seery. BARBARA LEAMING: Greg Garrison, Henry Jaglom, and Alessandro Tasca di Cutò. ROBERT L. CARRINGER: Hilyard Brown, Frank Brady, Richard France, James Naremore. JAMES NAREMORE: Robert Carringer, Joseph McBride, and Jonathan Rosenbaum. FRANK BRADY: Anthony "Coach" Roskie, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Robert Carringer. JAMES HOWARD: Henry Jaglom. HARLAN LEBOW: Robert Carringer. JONATHAN ROSENBAUM: Bill Krohn, James Naremore, Jim Steinmeyer, Bret Wood, George Fanto, and Joseph McBride. PETER BOGDANOVICH: Elizabeth Wilson. JUAN COBOS: Alessandro Tasca. DAVID CHARVET: Stan Kramien. SIMON CALLOW: Anthony "Coach" Roskie and James Naremore. DAVID THOMSON: Henry Jaglom.

  First, there is Welles himself. He fibbed a lot, as he confessed and as five of his more recent biographers prove up to a point. But the more important questions left unexplored are: what did he lie about, to whom, under what circumstances, and why? Indeed, which were true lies in the sense of intending to deceive, and which were simply tall tales designed only to entertain? And, for his childhood years, which are real memories and which false, or just family fables that he repeated unwittingly? The answers are surprising. He wasn’t a pathological liar as has been suggested. To the extent that he lied, he was selective and calculating. From whatever unconscious depths they may have been conjured, his lies were strictly Machiavellian – each crafted to amuse or manipulate or both.

  Orson, boy and man, was never moralistic. But he was, with some major lapses, highly ethical. And, although magic has its power-taking manipulative side, it is an ethical art. As master magician Karl Germain explained, “Conjuring is the only absolutely honest profession – a conjuror promises to deceive and does."6 Because Orson was also an entertainer those lies and deceptions were designed more often to amuse others and himself. This second group comprises the persons who knew him only slightly or indirectly and then not in any professional sense. They aren't producers, directors, cinematographers, film editors, set or costume designers, lighting or sound engineers, actors, or magicians. They know only Welles’ finished works – not the man – and their efforts to infer the latter from the former are at best second-hand pop psychology creating new myths and purveying much nonsense. These conclusions prove at best worthless, at worst fog our picture of Welles.

  Third are those who, although also knowing him only in passing or during brief collaboration, were otherwise his professional peers in at least one closely observed activity. Their reported observations – whether positive or negative and usually both – have much value but are open to the usual misunderstanding of short-sightedness and so must be carefully weighed against the views of the next two groups who enjoyed both wider perspectives and multiple contacts.

  Fourth are the people who'd known him close-up both professionally and socially at different periods and for some time. These individuals saw both his faults and his virtues yet could appreciate him for himself. Most that fall in this group were true friends. Their perceptions of Orson deserve very close attention.

  Fifth, a sub-set of the preceding group, are his closest magician friends and collaborators. Their insights earn our closest attention because only conjurors could appreciate how Welles' ability to think like a magician affected everything he did.

  This book is not a biography of a conjuror nor a psychological profile. It is the story of a man who thought like a magician. This self-taught ability enabled him to create in different arts and to manipulate different types of people. And to do so to a more conscious degree than most artists or ordinary folk. But the most fascinating aspect of Orson Welles is not his bravura creations on stage and in radio and films. It is his bravura creation of an extraordinary person – himself.

  6Germain as quoted in Stuart Cramer, Germain the Wizard and His Legerdemain (1966), 107. From here on I'll call my subject Orson rather than Welles. It saves one letter per mention. Besides, as he said, "Everybody calls me Orson" – a presumptuous familiarity that surprised but never annoyed him, knowing that he alone could open the doo
rs to any real intimacy.

  PART I: THE MAKING OF A MAGUS (1915-1934)

  George Orson Welles was conceived in rural Kenosha, Wisconsin, and born there on 6 May 1915 into a prosperous and preposterous family. He was raised since age three in metropolitan Chicago.

  SORCEROR’S APPRENTICE Orson began to hocus-pocus at age four. He was inspired by and first learned that art, as did so many other young conjurors, from a Mysto Magic set. That simple box of tricks had been a gift from Dr. Maurice A. Bernstein. This handsome Russian-Jewish orthopedist was Orson's physician and his mother's lover. Orson called him “Dadda"1 — to his real father's annoyance. Dr. Bernstein (pronounced bern-STEEN, as he insisted), observing the child's delight and quick proficiency, gave him a second, more advanced magic set at age five. Dadda could have bought these kits from either of Chicago's two magic shops (The Chicago Magic Company or Art Felsman's), but it's much more likely he got them in the famous Marshall Fields emporium's large toy department, where Orson had recently made his professional stage debut by being paid a few dollars to portray Peter Rabbit in a tableau.

  Mysto Magic kits were an open sesame for generations of aspiring young magi. Made and marketed since 1908 by John A. Petrie and A. C. Gilbert's Mysto Manufacturing Company and then from 1916 through 1956 by the successor A.C. Gilbert Company, even their smallest box of tricks revealed the secret methods of the art. Omitted from the early sets were a standard deck of playing cards and, of course, any large illusions—he'd acquire those later. Nevertheless, these few tiny props and their accompanying 32-page bare-bones instruction booklet were enough to make it clear to the alert child that all the secret methods of magicians are simple. Indeed, as Orson later said, “ridiculously simple".

  When given a magic set or taught a trick, most kids merely conclude, Oh, so that's how it's done! Puzzle solved, they then shift to the more weighty matters of childhood. But a rare few like Orson sense underlying principles and become intrigued. Knowing how a trick is done and being able to fool others are quite different matters. At some point the aspiring sorceror must go beyond the Mysto Magic stage of awareness and learn how to deceive. The real secrets of magic aren't its mechanical methods like wires, mirrors, trapdoors, gimmicks, or sleights. Those are merely tools of the conjuring trade, as inconsequential for judging their craft as paint-boxes and brushes are for judging the worth of a Rembrandt. Fox-TV’s clumsy “Masked Magician” of 1998 exposed only those tools, not the mind games that deceive us. Such exposers teach no one how to become a magician.