Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1

by Barton Whaley

  76 France (1977), 27-28; Leaming (1989), 37-39; Higham (1985), 54.

  77OW letter to Hill, Sep 1931, quoted in France (1977), 28.

  78OW 1 Apr 76 interview in Griffin (1982), 38-39.

  Edwards, who would work closely with Orson for the first three weeks, had made Orson accept one condition as the basis of his hiring: “Don't obey me blindly, but listen to me. More important still, listen to yourself. I can help you how to play this part [the meaty role of the Duke in Jew Süss], but you must see and hear what's good about yourself and what's lousy." Orson replied, “But I know that already."81 Whether or not he did, this would become Orson's own philosophy when directing other actors.

  From the beginning of what would prove a long working relationship with the Gate's other codirector, Micheál Mac Liammóir recognized that Orson's great secret was a “superb inner confidence that no one could blow out. ... He knew that he was precisely what he himself would have chosen to be had God consulted him on the subject at his birth."82

  He reveled in the opportunities to exercise his many talents at the Gate. There, in addition to subbing as scene painter and assistant press agent, he acted in one major role and several minor ones that were applauded by both audiences and critics. The most enthusiastic critic, writing the theatrical “Chitchat and Criticism" column in an Irish sporting and society weekly under the by-line of “Knowles Noel Shane", was Orson himself, or so he later claimed.83

  After their evening shows he would entertain junior members of the troupe plus hanger-on Trinity College students during late meals at cheap Dublin eateries with tales of the eccentricities of his “nine" aunts and his adventures in China, Greece, and Turkey. His delighted listeners accepted these as the fictions they were meant to be.84 If his wild stories didn't deceive, his lies about his age did somewhat. Introducing himself as 18 (when actually 16) he gradually increased this to 22 and sometimes even 24.85 However, these latter numbers exceeded the limits of credulity of the majority of his Dublin acquaintances, most of whom accepted 18, with only the rare skeptics like Edwards and Mac Liammóir suspecting less.86

  He was at ease with the open homosexuality of the Gate's two co-director lovers, Edwards and Mac Liammóir. In childhood his mother's bohemian friends had made him aware of the art world's tolerance for a wide range of sexual expression. Initially embarrassed by the occasional advances from men long before Dr. Mueller, he quickly learned to manipulate his way out without causing them embarrassment—he would lie trivially but tactfully by saying he had a “headache".87 Then in his midteens he found that a matter-of-fact admission of his own heterosexual bent was sufficient to ease social and professional relationships with homosexuals and bisexuals, male and female alike. This tolerance often served well in later years: helping get his first Broadway acting job and then when directing his own casts and crews of stage, film, and magic shows. Indeed he became sufficiently comfortable to write homoerotic subthemes for the protagonists or main characters in four of his works: Bright Lucifer (1934), Iago in Othello (1952), The Other Side of the Wind (1970s), and The Big Brass Ring (1981).

  79 OW in 1982 With Orson Welles interview.

  80MacLiammóir (1946/1967ed), 127.

  81Mac Liammóir (1946/1967ed), 129.

  82Mac Liammóir (1946/1961ed), 127.

  83OW in his drafts for his Leonard Lyons guest columns for 10 Feb 1943 and 1 Dec 1944. A search by staff of the Dublin Gate Theatre Archive at Northwestern University did not turn up this by-line. (R. Russell Maylone letter to BW, 19 Aug 94.) Without independent verification, OW's "Knowles Noel Shane" story is hard to accept, particularly given the fact that a few years later (in 1934) he was hired for his first job in radio by a man with the same very rare given name, Knowles Entrikin. However, using a pseudonym to critique or defend one's own accomplishment is, of course, not so much a hoax as the kind of practical joke that would appeal to Orson. Indeed, as pointed out to me by Jonathan Rosenbaum (conversation of 28 Dec 2001),. Orson himself would use this method in 1972 in ghosting an eloquent defense of his authorship of Citizen Kane.

  84Mac Liammóir (1946/1967ed), 131; Higham (1985), 58.

  85Johnston & Smith (1940), II, 54, based on OW's contemporary letters to Skipper Hill.

  86Lady Longford (wife of a Gate Theatre director) letter to Noble (1956), 60.

  He would also come to actively and vocally champion blacks, Latinos, Jews, Catholics, and women during times when that wasn't always fashionable even in his liberal and theatrical circles. This stand, as with homosexuals, won him throughout the rest of his life the loyalty of many talented minority professionals.

  * * * From Dublin Orson went in early 1932 to London. But he was unable to get theatrical employment there because recent Ministry of Labour regulations blocked the necessary work permit for foreigners. So, in March, back to the States and Skipper Hill who found busy work for his young friend. First on the Todd faculty as drama coach directing the Todd Troupers. Then that summer co-writing a play while living in a lake-side wigwam on the Ojibway Indian Reservation in Wisconsin.

  Early next year Skipper set him to editing and illustrating a Shakespeare series for the Todd Press. Orson lived and worked in a tiny studio in what served as Chicago's Bohemian section. Some nights he would visit the vast Century of Progress world's fair on the South Side. There he could see Shakespeare staged in a replica of the Globe Theatre, big illusions performed on the stage of Carter the Great's large Temple of Mystery magic theater, conjurors Dorny and Johnny Platt performing in an oriental show, and, on the midway, Mickey MacDougal pitching Svengali Decks, Dai Vernon cutting silhouettes, or Bil Baird in his professional debut as a puppeter.88

  Finding interesting work for Orson was Skipper's preemptive strategy for keeping the boy from intruding more than wanted on his time. If these diversions required a few dollars, Skipper thought it worthwhile. Beginning with Skipper, Orson developed a lifelong habit of using those around him as stooges for his projects. He left it up to them to set the conditions and limits of their servitude.

  Conversely, Skipper recognized (and hence overcame) his own tendency to unnecessarily push his young friend. As he admitted to Orson in that terrible time of troubles in 1941 when it seemed that Citzen Kane might be suppressed by the studio before its release:89

  Frankly, I have always felt that you functioned better without me than when I was at your back. If things were not going well for Orson my remedy was to send him off someplace with twelve dollars and fifty cents. Push him off some edge with the assurance that he'd invent a new swimming stroke when he hit the water. Or, if there was no water below, assured that like a cat he would light on his feet.

  87 OW 1983 interview in Leaming (1985), 17.

  88For more on magic at the Chicago fair see George Boston, Inside Magic (1947); Steinmeyer (ed), Jarrett (1981); and Berg (1983), 50.

  89Hill undated [around March 1941] letter to OW.

  Orson suggested he could work better abroad. So, late that spring of 1933, he was off on a freighter to Morocco where he became the guest of the Pasha of Marrakesh whose son he'd met in Paris during his previous trip to the Continent. In addition to editing and illustrating the Shakespeare plays, he spent two or three days each week in the palace writing detective tales that he sold through a Chicago contact to American pulp magazines, thereby joining the ranks of such notable pulp mystery writers as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The protagonist of his five short stories is a young amateur playboy detective living with his aunt in Baltimore.90 It was surely inspired by the spoof character of “William J. Spurns", a young amateur playboy detective living in New York, which Orson had acted at Todd six years earlier in Skipper Hill's musical comedy, Finesse the Queen, and based on the then famous founder of the William J. Burns International Detective Agency.91

  These stories show Orson smoothly transferring his knowledge of deception theory to yet another new medium. The art of writing mysteries is, of course, an exercise in deceiving the reader. Raymond C
handler made an analogy between sleight-of-hand and the plotting of detective stories when he wrote, “The most effective way to conceal a simple mystery is behind another mystery. This is literary legerdemain. You do not fool the reader by hiding clues or faking character à la [Agatha] Christie but by making him solve the wrong problem." Here is misdirection at its best.

  {SIDEBAR}: PASHA FACT OR FICTION Orson often told a colorful story about his stay in Marrakesh as the guest of the Pasha, the Glaoui. Biographer Simon Callow not only questions the truth of this story but did much commendable research on it. Although inconclusive, Callow’s account raises substantial doubt. While sharing that doubt, I'm less sure it’s justified. Most importantly, in 1931, two years before

  Orson, Morocco had been toured by three of his future associates, Aaron Copland, Paul Bowles, and Henry Dunham. Bowles and his friend-lover Dunham even received palatial hospitality in Fez and also visited Marrakesh.92 These are noteworthy coincidences given the fact that Morocco was then a remote and exotic destination available to only the most adventuresome American tourists. So I'm surprised that neither their three autobiographies nor their several biographers cast doubt on Orson's story. Even if to conceal a testable lie Orson had avoided telling his story to any of these three, they surely would have heard it from their many co-workers like Jack Houseman or Virgil Thomson during their close association with Orson from 1936 through 1939. Consequently, even their silence modestly supports Orson’s seemingly tall tale. {END SIDEBAR}

  Thence that summer to Spain and Seville where Orson claimed he rented a private room in a brothel in the Gypsy quarter of Triana. There the penny-a-word fee (standard at that time) from his pulp sales made him feel that “I was a rich fellow in those days." Some of those dollars went to buy bulls that he fought in a minor local ring with terrified enthusiasm but no distinction. Performing on “three or four occasions" as El Americano, the young novillero admitted he was “no damn good" and even managed to get himself gored in the thigh.93 (I'd mistrusted Orson's bullfighting claims until reading Micheál Mac Liammóir's 1949 diary. There the until then equally skeptical Irish aficionado mentions finding a photo of a young Orson “in matador's clothes killing his bull in the arena at Seville.")94

  90 OW interview with Ivonne Baby in El País, No.121 (Madrid), 6 Mar 1982, p.1, as cited in Riambau (1993), 19; Leaming (1985), 60; Ward (1985), 35; Bill Blackbeard telephone interview, 9 Dec 92, citing his conversation in the 1970s with Nils Hardin, editor of a pulp fanzine, who had interviewed a notably forgetful Orson on this point in the 1970's. [track these stories thru Mystery, Detective, and Espionage Fiction: A Checklist of Fiction in U.S. Pulp Magazines (Garland Press, 2 vols., c.1988).

  91 Johnston & Smith (1940), II, 52; Higham (1985), 49.

  92On the 1931 Copland-Bowles-Dunham tour see Sawyer-Lauçanno (1989), 110-119.

  93Cobos, Rubio, & Pruneda (1964/1966), 41; Riambau (1993), 20.

  Additional confirmation is reported by the Welsh-English actor, Keith Baxter. In early 1965 Baxter was in Madrid where Orson had introduced him to bullfighting and bullfighters, including, as Baxter reported:95

  An elderly bandillero who worked with the legendary Antonio Ordonez claimed to have seen the teenage Welles in action in a small town outside Seville. Welles had fought with courage, but without style he said.

  The old man's 32-year-old memory of such an event is plausibly accurate, given the extraordinary rarity of Yankee or Anglo-Saxon bullfighters in Spain above the rank of pure amateur (like Barnaby Conrad). The only other of whom I've heard in the inter-war period was Sydney Franklin, Hemingway's friend.

  * * * Soon after returning to the States, Orson tried to con his way onto the New York stage by puffing up his rather decent Dublin credentials, declaring that he'd also played the world-famous Abbey Theatre. In fact, the Abbey Players had been touring the USA throughout his Dublin months.96 But Orson really had trod that illustrious stage — one Sunday night on loan from the Gate as a fill-in pro in an amateur production.97 So, while his claim to have played the Abbey had a spot of truth, it was still a lie because of his intent to imply membership in that most distinguished of theatrical companies. It became a modestly durable element in Wellesian myth that pops up from time to time unchallenged, as in Meryman (1978).

  Nevertheless he landed an acting job with the elite American troupe of Katharine Cornell. At that time Kit Cornell was being called the First Lady of Theater, a superlative honorific she was sharing with three other actresses in America. But she was truly first among equals in number of fans and the most hit shows. At first try Orson had leapt into the Big Time.

  How had he managed this rare coup? Wise for his age and time, he knew that the answer was to play one's connections to the utmost rather than just stumble through life's chancy Yellow Pages. And the best of connections came at this crucial moment. Skipper and Horty Hill had been invited to an arty cocktail party in Chicago and brought their 18-year-old friend along. There he met 36-year-old Pulitzer Prize novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder and, mistaking this Puritanically asexual man for a homosexual “queen", tried to ingratiate himself with a bit of campy banter.98 Although this ploy failed, its goal was achieved when, to Orson's surprise, Wilder recognized the youth from two separate sources that had richly praised Orson's acting: clippings the writer’s sister had passed along from Dublin friends and The New York Times’s Dublin theater columnist. Wilder urged a reluctant Orson to stick with acting. And told him that, if he'd hop the Broadway Limited train to New York, Wilder would telephone ahead to his close friend, theatrical critic Alexander Woollcott, to set up an appointment for Orson to discuss a stage career.

  94 Mac Liammóir (1952), 78.

  95Baxter (1998), 91.

  96France (1977), 22, 27, 36.

  97Madeline Ross interview in Noble (1956), 59; Rosenbaum in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 329.

  98Callow (1996), 138, errs in labelling Wilder "gay". On Wilder's profound asexuality see Richard H. Goldstone, Thornton Wilder: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975).

  Aleck Woollcott was then the nation's top radio personality. His Sunday evening CBS The Town Cryer show of personalized commentary, anecdotes, and criticism enthralled an audience of six million that earned him a for then fabulous $3,500 weekly pay check. This clever 46-year-old fat man with a squeeky voice was also one of those few celebrities who often went out of their way to help and promote young talent. At that very moment he was letting young Alexander King live in his big apartment overlooking the East River until King's luck would turn, as it soon did.

  So King was present when “Orson Welles suddenly showed up, looking terrible. Woollcott immediately dressed him from head to foot", giving him “all the clothes he could spare" and “took him out and got him shoes, which were hard to find because his feet were so big."99 Properly attired, Orson was taken that evening to an elegant restaurant where Woollcott was impressed enough to decide to pass him along to Guthrie McClintic, Kit Cornell's close partner and, given the sexual masquerades of that time, husband and wife in title only. McClintic approved and Orson got his big Broadway start. His straight to gay-friendly networking had clicked.

  Woollcott wasn't quite sure he'd "done well by Miss Cornell" until days later when he had a chance to observe Orson's behavior at an intimate dinner where they were the only guests of Cornelia Gray Lunt, a wealthy spinster and social lioness from Evanston, Illinois, where she'd known Orson. While they dined in her suite at the St. Regis, New York's then most elegant hotel, Woollcott marveled at how his 18-year-old acquaintance handled himself with these two worldly companions, Woollcott at 46 and Miss Lunt at an outrageous 91.100 He would later neatly sum up young Orson in his immortal quip (later misattributed to Herman Mankiewicz), “There, but for the grace of God, goes God!”101

  * * * We all invent our public images. Most of us do so unwittingly, thereby fueling a lucrative industry for psychotherapists and others of that tribe. But Orson took conscious pleasure
in inventing himself. He told a director friend: “I've always hidden behind masks all my life." And to one biographer, “He freely—even delightedly—admitted to having so embellished certain stories about himself that they seldom came out the same way twice." And indeed they didn't.102 At least not with people whom he considered fair game. After all he'd been raised to be an entertainer and learned in self-defence to be a manipulator.

  His simplest mask was a false nose, his own being short, tilted upward, and a bit pug-like. “Both Laurence Olivier and I", Orson said, “detest our own noses. They tend to give our faces a comic appearance, whereas we both have a strong desire to play mainly dramatic rôles. For all normal uses, my own nose is quite pleasant and fairly decorative. It stopped growing, however, when I was about ten years old. Thus it is violently unsuitable for rôles such as Lear, Macbeth and Othello." Since as early as a school performance at age 14 as Richard III we see him wearing a succession of fake noses in all but a handful of his theatrical and movie parts.103

  99 Alexander King interview in Teichmann (1976), 197.

  100Alexander Woollcott, Long, Long Ago (New York: Viking, 1943), 66-72.

  101Attributed to Woollcott by Noble (1956), 22. Attributed to Mankewicz in 1940 at the RKO studios by Meredith (1974), 302; and thence by Meryman (1978), 237 & 263; Mordecai Richler in GQ (Oct 1985), 140; and many others. The earliest citation I find is in Rosten (1941), 51, where it is attributed to “someone”. The many variants of this line, with only the referent or the last name changed, trace back to the 16th century.

  102Jaglom in Perlmutter (1988), 4; Brady (1989), vii; Higham (1970), 190.

  John Houseman wrote that “It was always a shock to see Welles without the makeup and the false noses behind which he chose to mask himself."104 But Houseman often mistook the man for the actor. The fake noses were indeed masks, but ones that served only one precise purpose: Orson explained that while playing the role of a hateful character, “I put aside part of my political and moral beliefs, I put on a false nose, I do all that: but it remains Orson Welles. There's no use fighting it. Since I believe very strongly in the quality of chivalry, when I play the role of someone I detest, I put great value on being chivalrous in my interpretation."105 This calculated ambiguity is precisely how he forces us to empathize with Faust, Charles Foster Kane, Macbeth, Harry Lime, Mr. Arkadin, Hank Quinlan, even Prince Hal, and the other monsters of his creation or interpretation. Orson's admiring but puzzled new friend Françoise Sagan, French writer and film reviewer for L'Express, sought to understand him better by screening all his movies in one week. She concluded:106