Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1

by Barton Whaley

  I thought I recognized in all of them the same obsession: an obsession with temperament. Welles likes a certain kind of man, one no doubt like himself: violent, tender, intelligent, amoral, rich; self-obsessed and self-consuming, a force of nature, domineering, fearsome, never understood yet never complaining about it. The young and ruthless Kane, the arrogant Arkadin, the brooding Othello, all monstrous, all loners — the price of supreme intelligence. There is only one film in which he played the part of the victim—The Lady from Shanghai The role of the monster is left to Rita Hayworth; it must be said that he was in love with her.

  French filmmaker François Truffaut had a slightly different take: “He is a moralistic director, always showing the angel within the beast, the heart in the monster, the secret of the tyrant. This has led him to invent an acting style revealing the fragility behind power, the sensitivity behind strength."107

  We'll meet Orson in his other masks—some that reveal more than they hide. For now it's enough to know that all were as calculated and controlled as his putty noses. And we'll catch glimpses of him without disguise.

  ATLANTIC CITY SWAMI During his 1933-34 tour through America with Kit Cornell's troupe, Orson continued his usual off-stage high jinks. The season had begun with five weeks' rehearsal in New York in late OctoberNovember. One day on his own on the Atlantic City boardwalk he decided to try his hand as a pseudopsychic by reading palms. His was the traditional method of “mitt readers" and other fortune-tellers that they call “cold reading". He would, for example, solemnly announce to one person that “You have a scar on your knee." To another (or the same, for that matter) he'd proclaim “You went through a great emotional change between the ages of twelve and fourteen." And he was almost always right, because—if we stop to think what the psychic is really saying—such seemingly intimate personal details apply to most of us. By just such generalizations delivered with feigned intimacy do psychics reach their common claim of being right 80% of the time. And most adults will accept generalities when proclaimed with feigned intimacy in an all-knowing voice by any person to whom they’d granted the mantle of authority. Orson's cold readings were liberally supplemented by relying on a keen intuition he shared with all successful fortune-tellers. As he recalled later, “I believe I saw and deduced things my conscious mind did not record." In general, he added, “I told people good things [and] made them happy."108 He recognized that the real secret of this “racket" was human gullibility: “Most people want to be fooled. When you tell them something about themselves, they only hear what's true and they don't notice what isn't."109 As one mentalist frankly admitted, “Fortune telling ... is basically a mixture of counseling and social work draped in a framework of mysticism."110 But Orson also saw its sinister side where, as with Macbeth's three weird women, prophesy can inspire hitherto unthought, even otherwise unthinkable actions.

  103 OW interview with Noble (1956), 82. Olivier admits his own nose-o-phobia in Laurence Olivier, Confessions of an Actor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 38. For more on his wonderful noses see Brady (1989), 60-61; Leaming (1985), 350, 353, 401, 424; Higham (1985), 60; and Howard (1991), 13.

  104Houseman (1972), 150.

  105OW's 1958 interview in Les Cahiers du Cinéma, as quoted in Comito (1985), 208. OW had earlier made the same point regarding Caesar in a 1937 interview with the New York Times. This point is accepted by Naremore (1978/1989), 12.

  106Sagan (1985), 84.

  107Truffaut, American Film Institute address, 9 Feb 1975.

  Cornell’s long road tour began on November 25th. The entire company of 40 players and 14 staff spent the next 29 months traveling by train. They occupied four private carriages for themselves and their scenery and props. Orson shared a double-berth on the train and a hotel room with 29-year-old actor John Hoystradt (later renamed Hoyt). He was impressed by Orson's generally high spirits that frequently ended in misbehavior, particularly by often being late. Once for example (on March 29th), having missed the train's departure, Orson drew on his inheritance to hire a private airplane to make the jump to Indianapolis for the next scheduled performance.111

  Miss Cornell's long-time personal manager, Gertrude "Gert" Macy, recalled of Orson that “After a performance in San Francisco one night [8 January 1934], he put on a wig, a moustache, a beard and flowing cape and paraded around the Mark Hopkins Hotel as some foreign dignitary."112 This prank had also been observed by Miss Cornell who, in her regal way, sent a note to Orson's table suggesting it was time for the teenager to return the costume to wardrobe and toddle off to bed.113

  In early March while the troupers stopped off for a week in Kansas City, Missouri, Orson returned to his psychic reading scam. Putting on a turban and calling himself a “Swami"—which as he later admitted was “the corniest name I could think of!"—he rented a front parlor in the shabby downtown area and posted a sign advertising readings. To his clients “I began just saying things off the top of my head." All went well until an attractive woman in her late 30's appeared. Wearing a bright red dress, she seemed “perfectly happy"—nothing on the surface to suggest her recent tragedy. Yet by luck or insight he blurted out the truth, “You just lost your husband" and she burst into tears. “I quit then, because I had become what is known as a shut eye; that is an expression in the rackets, an occupational disease of the psychics which is to believe yourself. You are receiving [clues and cues] instantaneously and you give the answers before you have consciously rationalized. All I could do was comfort her in her loss and close up shop." After this sobering lesson on the price of arrogance, he recalled the cautionary advice of the pro mindreader who'd warned him about those psychics who come to believe in their “power". Consequently he dropped psychic readings from his bag of tricks.114

  108 Tynan (1961/1967), 294; Ward (1983), 34; Brady (1989), 54, who jumbles this with the later episode in Kansas City.

  109OW in recording of Orson Welles' Eversharp Almanac, Episode 6 (1945).

  110T.A. Waters, Omnimancy: A Treatise on Fortunetelling (1981), 2.

  111Hoystradt 1975 talk at Studio One in Hollywood as cited in Higham (1985), 66; Gertrude Macy 1972 letter to France (1977), 43.

  112Gertrude Macy 1972 letter to France (1977), 43. See also Brady (1989), 54.

  113Tad Mosel, Leading Lady: The World and Theatre of Katharine Cornell (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), 337.

  The stopover in Kansas City brought Orson a further welcome diversion. On the afternoon of March 11th he and John Hoystradt joined Kit in her rented house to listen to a radio broadcast of Toscanini conducting the New York Philharmonic. This was one of the regular Sunday afternoon CBS broadcasts that reached an estimated audience of nine million Americans They were so impressed that the three of them caught later performances by the maestro, even if they had to take a night train to some nearby city to get within range of a CBS network station.115

  For the jump from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Louisville, Kentucky, on April 8th Cornell and McClintic had their hotel pack lunches and separated from the rest of the company to take Orson, Hoystradt, Gertrude Macy (Kit's manager), and actress Brenda Forbes on a leisurely Sunday trip down the Ohio River. Their vessel was the coal-powered steamboat, the Chris Greene, a recently built 190-foot sternwheeler. Operated by the famous Greene Line Steamboats, Inc., out of Cincinnati, their genial captain, co-owner, and hostess was 60-year-old Mary “Ma” Greene, since 1897 one of only a handful of women licensed river-boat pilots. I hope Orson and his fellow troupers knew to BYOB as their teetotal captain ran a dry bar.116 The troupe then had a day off in Princeton, New Jersey, on May 6th, Orson's 19th birthday.

  The long tour across the USA and back ended at the Brooklyn Opera House on June 20th. The company had spent 29 weeks on the road, traveling 17,000 miles to give 225 performances in 75 cities and towns in 31 states (and Toronto, Canada) for nearly a half million people. It had been an extraordinary experience for all. And Orson had earned some kudos, a few from the critics, some grudging remarks from McClintic, bu
t a wholehearted comment from Miss Cornell: "We were all struck by his beautiful voice and always provocative acting method."117

  With much free time during the tour Orson discovered a literary-artistic genre widely if rather inaccurately associated with childhood—the newspaper comic strip. He began a long love affair with Krazy Kat, Terry and the Pirates, and the early L'il Abner. He even planned in 1940, seventeen years ahead of academics and art critics, to write an article for Harper's magazine extolling the comics as a worthy art form at a time when such expressions of “mass culture" were dismissed with snobbish contempt by the intelligentsia.118

  * * * During the Cornell troupe's summer recess, 19-year-old Orson joined Skipper Hill's theater festival in Woodstock, Illinois. With Skipper's approval he conceived and executed a neat academic fraud to help finance the event. Outside students—teenage boys and girls—would be accepted for a two-month summer-school drama course for the then hefty tuition of $250, if they passed an audition. This last twist was Orson's, so he personally conducted the auditions, making sure that all 20 applicants passed. Moreover, as Skipper later confessed, “the school was a phony" because no formal instruction was given — only on-the-job experience slaving for the staff, the 15 paid pro actors, and Orson.119

  114 OW on recording of Orson Welles' Eversharp Almanac, Episode 6 (1945). Substantially repeated in 1966 interview in Tynan (1967); and in Ward (1983), 34; and Leaming (1985), 70-71; based on their interviews with Welles in 1983.

  115Cornell (1939), 142. See also Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini (New York: Knopf, 1987), 139.

  116Cornell (1939), 143. Also Dave Dawley’s internet site, .

  117Cornell (1939), 127.

  118Johnston & Smith (1940), II, 54; OW in Welles & Bogdanovich tape edition of This is Orson Welles (1992), Tape 4, Side 8. The article never appeared. The breakthrough book that made the popular arts intellectually and academically acceptable was my colleague and friend David Manning White's Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (1957).

  The festival was planned around three plays, Trilby (featuring Orson's demonic Svengali), Tsar Paul, and Hamlet. During the weeks of rehearsal of this last work, popular American novelist, playwright, and distinguished Hamlet scholar Thornton Wilder was a guest in Skipper and Horty Hill's home. His visit coincided with the initial Todd Press printings of the Hill-Welles editions of Shakespeare. Wilder was amazed by the professionalism of the school's printing plant but was even more view of by Orson's interpretation. Wilder declared the opening four sentences of Orson's Introduction the finest summation of the Elizabethan's genius ever written.120 Here they are:121

  Shakespeare said everything. Brain to belly; every mood and minute of a man's season. His language is starlight and fireflies and the sun and moon. He wrote it with tears and blood and beer, and his words march like heart-beats.

  We don't know Wilder's reaction to the follow-on sentence, one that ended the paragraph in words that proclaimed Orson's revolutionary views on how modern audiences can best approach Shakespeare: He speaks to everyone and we all claim him but it's wise to remember, if we would really appreciate him, that he doesn't properly belong to us but to another world; a florid and entirely remarkable world that smelled assertively of columbine and gun powder and printer's ink, and was vigorously dominated by Elizabeth.

  It was this early view that Orson henceforth applied to all his many distinctive and controversial Shakespearian productions on stage and in text, radio, and film. While his randy guest stars from Ireland, Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammóir, pursued the teenage Todd boys, the boys (well, most of them) chased the girls, and Orson seduced bright and pretty Miss Virginia Nicholson, 18, who had passed up her debutante coming-out party to work the festival.

  He took a few hours off one day to debut as a movie producer, co-director, and assistant camera operator. Purely for diversion he got together with Virginia and a cameraman friend to spoof the then fashionable surrealistic art-films of Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, and Luis Buñuel. Shot as a 16mm black-and-white silent, it runs only five minutes. Although made as an amateur's joke, The Hearts of Age reveals Orson's life-long “hatred" of symbolic imagery. As Bret Wood first pointed out, “such devices are peripheral to the central meaning" in Orson's scripts, which are "expressed through narrative and dialogue." Thus even such powerfully evocative images as:122

  The snow-filled glass ball of Citizen Kane, the clock angel of The Stranger and Welles' other visual symbols are not puzzles to be deciphered by the viewer but reflections of elements clearly presented in the film. The symbols are used to remind the viewer of aspects of the story which make the entire film more significant when considered in relation to that scene in which it is surreptitiously placed (the viewer's perception of Elsa is enhanced by the huge creatures in the aquarium where she seduces Michael in The Lady from Shanghai).

  119 Leaming (1985), 74-75, based on her 1983 interviews with Roger Hill, Hascy Tarbox, and OW. Also Hill (1977), 123, where he puts the tuition at $500.

  120HIll (1984), 75-76.

  121Roger Hill and Orson Welles (editors), Everybody's Shakespeare (Woodstock, Ill.: The Todd Press, 1934), Introduction, p.22.

  122Wood (1990), 151-152.

  Orson never used visual symbols to mystify, much less hint at any possible psychological underpinnings of his characters. So what of Kane's snow-globe? He cheerfully credited his co-script writer Mankiewicz with that idea, saying, "It's a gimmick, really, and rather dollar-book Freud."123 And “Rosebud”? Again Orson credited his co-writer.

  He portrayed people on film as on stage for what they do, specifically how they deal with power—how they get it, use it, and lose it. When directing actors he never explained their motivation, only what he wanted them to do and say, leaving them free to inject their own interpretation. Disinterested in motives on stage or in life, Orson never asked, “What does she mean by that?" His judgement on psychoanalysis: “About as valuable as—but considerably more expensive than—consulting your local astrologer."124

  123OW interview in Powell (1963).

  124OW in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 242. PART II: NEW YORK!, NEW YORK! (1934-1939)

  BROADWAY UNLIMITED A memorable summer ended, Orson packed his Mysto Magic set in his head and moved to New York City to try his hand on Broadway. While waiting for Miss Cornell's new season to open in December he applied for his first job in radio. This was one of the minor speaking parts in CBS's School of the Air of the Americas, a daily afternoon series, which paid $18.50 per show. Appearing for an interview in the Madison Avenue office of CBS's drama director Knowles Entrikin he met a tall, slim, handsome stage actor with a soft Virginian accent who was seeking one of the same jobs. Enter Joseph "Jo" Cotten. Orson, to disguise his youthfulness that day, had adopted a new mask – a pipe. Unfamiliar with the proper handling of this dangerous device, he knocked the smoldering dottle into the director's wastebasket, starting a fire that drew uncomplimentary attention. But he got the job.1

  And so did Jo Cotten. Although ten years older than Orson, they shared a sardonic humor and a love of practical joking, high-living, booze, and women that would sustain a life-long friendship. After its end Jo wrote, “I know little about Orson's childhood and seriously doubt that he ever was a child."

  That November Orson and Virginia married quietly. And remarried the following month to please her socialite parents. But it didn't please his wealthy new father-in-law when Orson declined his suggestion that he become a stock broker.

  It did please the in-laws that the fancy but phony second wedding had been officiated by bigname Congregational minister Vincent G. Burns. The Reverend Burns's autograph was in demand as coauthor of the recent best-selling autobiography of his brother and its popular spin-off movie, I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. But it would take another three years for Orson to become famous enough to begin refusing autographs to clamoring fans. So why was his signature already being forged? It was appearing on the
title pages of many copies of his first books, those three volumes in the Everybody's Shakespeare series co-edited and illustrated by Orson and published that year by the Todd Press in Woodstock. Anticipating his protégé's future fame with its consequent market for autographs, Skipper got Hascy Tarbox to inscribe Orson's name on piles of copies. "I got terribly good," said the artistically inclined Tarbox when later proudly admitting his forgeries, which extended to doing Skipper's signatures as well. Orson, when he found out, was not amused.2 (Collectors beware! In March 2001 an internet antiquarian book dealer was offering copies "signed by Orson Welles" for $2,000 and $2,500 when unsigned copies were going for only $175 to $350.)

  * * * When Katharine Cornell's winter season opened (December 6th in Detroit and thence to Broadway on the 20th) with Romeo and Juliet, Orson's two roles were minor and drew little notice from the critics. But one Broadway first-nighter noticed. John Houseman was spellbound – so much so that he wanted Orson for himself. The sophisticated 32-year old Romanian-born Alsatian-British Jewish grain merchant-turned-theatrical director had, as the protégé and roommate of composer Virgil Thomson, begun to make a name from his first avant-garde stage production, Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts. When Houseman brought Orson to the flat he shared with Thomson, the latter recalled, “That Orson could be so overbearing at eighteen was in his favor; that he had already directed plays in Dublin we did not believe.”3