Lovie Joe, that ever lovin’ man
From ‘way home in Birmingham.
He can do some lovin’ an’ some lovin’ sho’, An’ when he starts to love me I jes’ hollers “Mo”!
Orson’s considerable understanding of jazz impressed critics Joseph P. Delaney and Dave Dexter Jr, composer Duke Ellington, and clarinetists Barney Bigard and Joe Darensbourg.54 One measure of Orson's depth of understanding was his ability to tell authentic jazz from the cheap imitations that were already being touted by some pop jazz and folk faddists.55 Nor did he accept the narrow view of snobbish afficionados (“moldy figs” we called them) who preached that the only good jazz was the traditional New Orleans style.
Over the years Orson would commission or employ and admire such American jazz masters as Joe Jordan, Count Basie, Cee Pee Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Barney Bigard, Nat King Cole (in his pre-pop "Trio" days), Meade Lux Lewis, Billie Holiday, Hazel Scott, Kid Ory, Jimmy Noone, Joe Darensbourg, Ethel Waters, Wingy Manone, Billy Strayhorn, and European jazzmen Martial Solal (French) and Daniel Humair (Swiss).
51 Brady (1989), 81.
52Leonard Feather, The Encyclopedia of Jazz (New edition, New York: Horizon Press, 1960), 22.
53Thomas L. Morgan, “Joe Jordan” at
54Delaney telephone interview, 1991; Dave Dexter, Jr., Playback Playback 241; Barney Bigard, With Louis and the Duke: The Autobiography of a Clarinetist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 85-86.
55Orson Welles, “Foreword” in Dave Dexter Jr., Jazz Cavalcade (New York:Criterion, 1946), vi-vii;
Orson met Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, the great and popular jazz and swing trumpeter, singer, band leader. It was late 1940 and Armstrong had just arrived on the West Coast on a transcontinental tour. They agreed to do a movie about Armstrong’s life as a jazzman. Next year this project, tentatively called “Jazz Story”, will become part of Orson’s never realized four-part omnibus movie titled It’s All True.56
His early appreciation of jazz was unusual among Americans who were neither musicians nor black. Moreover, he understood and made frequent use of this musical form. This deserves more than the passing notice given by his biographers. Moreover, I believe it's easily explained. The essence of jazz is its improvisational structure and improv was Orson's ideal for himself as director, actor, magician, and person. And, as we'll repeatedly see, he was happiest with actors whenever they brought that special creative thrill to their roles. He treasured the unexpected in art and in life.
{SIDEBAR:} Accidental Improv
Orson so delighted in happy accidents that he let stand at least two slips of dialog in his films. First, in Citizen Kane (1941) when Jo Cotten, playing his famous drunk reporter scene sober but exhausted, was supposed to say to Kane, "Well, you said yourself you were looking for someone to do dramatic criticism." Instead out came, "crammatic crimetism", which Orson happily accepted.57
The second lucky moment came 21 years later in The Trial (1962) when the script called for a nervous Anthony Perkins to explain to the police who were searching his apartment, "That's just my phonograph.". Instead out popped, "That's just my pornograph."
When Bogdanovich mentioned John Ford’s remark about “most of the good things in pictures” happening “by accident,” Orson’s delighted comment was, “Yes! You could almost say that a director is a man who presides over accidents.”58
{END SIDEBAR}
For all his musical knowledge and many-sided creativity, Orson evidently never composed a tune except for that little “Everyone loves the fellow who is smiling" song he'd written at prep school. However he would write the risqué lyrics of “This Is Myrtle’s Wedding Day”, a song for Citizen Kane, which was cut along with the brothel scene.59 And, as we’ll see, he composed the words to two or three specially commissioned Strayhorn/Ellington tunes.60
Orson even sang, although rarely either publically or, except for his own "Everyone" ditty, even privately. He sang one song at the premier of his 1936 stage production of Horse Eats Hat – a rendition that convinced Virgil Thomson that Orson’s “ear was not for music.”61 In 1942 he recorded “You Made Me Love You”, which was later released in an anthology Calling All Stars LP album, an anthology of 15 songs recorded between 1932 and 1952 by 15 unlikely movie stars ranging from Humphrey Bogart to a duet by Charles Laughton & Elsa Lanchester. Four decades later he returned to musical performance but only as narrator. Daughter Beatrice had grown up to become briefly a pop-music critic for the London Times. Through her Orson came to appreciate some rock music, particularly the American heavy metal group Manowar for whom he volunteered promos and even narrated their "Dark Avenger", a somber piece about a Viking warrior who returns home bent on revenge. Orson recorded it with the group's four long-haired musicians in a Los Angeles sound studio and it was released in 1982 on their debut album, Battle Hymns.62
56 Laurence Bergreen, Louis Armstrong (New York: Broadway Books, 1997), 427, 428.
57Cotten interview in Action (May-Jun 1969), 30. The Cutting Continuity script has "dramatic crimitism".
58OW quoted in Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It (New York: Knopf, 1997), 40-41.
59Brady (1989), 267.
60A possible second composition is the absurd ditty in The Trial (1952) that accompanies K while awaiting his execution.
61Thompson (1966), 264. Also Thomson 1986 interview in Sawyer-Lauçanno (1989), 168.
Two years later (1984), at age 69, he'd record the lugubrious, "I Know What It Is to Be Young (but you don't know what it is to be old)." Again he only spoke the words to musical accompaniment. This was a five-minute piece with the Ray Charles Singers and the Nick Perito Orchestra. Unlike the offbeat piece for Manowar, I presume this was done just for the money.63
But for now, his early exposure to black music included the great Ellington big jazz & swing band after it followed the famous Cotton Club nitery down from Harlem to its new location at 48th & Broadway in mid-town Manhattan, where the band played on two occasions from March 1937 until June 1938. Regular customers included Stravinsky and Orson. Duke Ellington’s teenage son, Mercer, would recall an extraordinary scene:64
Orson Welles used to sit on the bandstand and write his scenarios. He used to like to sit right in the brass section and write while the band was playing. Nobody ever knew he was there, you know. He’d be sittin’ there in between the two rows between the trumpets and trombones.
PLAYING FAUST AND LOOSE That winter (1936) Orson was preparing Doctor Faustus as his second work at the Maxine Elliott's. Paul Bowles, the play's composer and orchestra conductor, observed him “using his repertory of magic tricks."65 In fact Orson would use magical and theatrical “trickwork" on a scale and of a type never before seen on Broadway. Only the vast 18th and 19th century opera and ballet stages of Europe and America had even approached the dramatic levels of special effects he was now about to unleash – and at a fraction of their cost.66
{SIDEBAR:} This play's subject invited such effects. How better to simulate the supernatural magic of wizards than by the natural magic of the stage sorceror. The real Georg Faust (who died in the 1530's) had been a German astrologer and practitioner of witchcraft. He became legend within five decades after his death, when Johann Spiess's Historia von Dr Johann Fausten (1587) first mingled fact with reports of earlier wonder workers to add the pact with Satan's emissary, Mephistophilis. The legend was further dramatized and popularized by several writers, notably Christopher Marlowe in his stage adaption of Spiess as The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1589); by Johann Nikolaus Pfizer in his 1674 version, which added the element of Faust's love for a poor girl; by Goethe in his drama Faust (1831); Berlioz in his opera La damnation de Faust (1948), Gounod in his opera Faust (1859); and, after Orson, Thomas Mann in his novel Faust (1947).67
{END SIDEBAR}
62 PieceBrady (1989), 570. "Dark Avenger" originally appeared on the Manowar debut LP album Battle Hymn (Liberty Records L
BG 30349) and thence on CD. Higham (1985), 328, misspells the band's name and errs in presumeing this was just another of Orson's "marginal assignments" that signaled his "fall".
63 Brady (1989), 569-570. "I Know" is on LP in the USA as GBNP Crescendo GNPS 1206 and in the UK as Splash SP 29.
64Mercer Ellinton in Wayne Enstice & Paul Rubin, Jazz Spoken Here (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 118, as quoted in Nicholson (1999), 124.
65Bowles (1972), 195.
66For early theatrical trickwork see Albert M. Hopkins, Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography (New York: Munn, 1898), 251-366.
This legendary necromancer was an obvious model for several modern ones who took his name. Others conjured Faustian images in their advertising posters, as with the Devil's imps who whisper into the ear of Kellar, that leading American turn-of-the-century stage illusionist who had passed his cape to Thurston. Orson was about to join this company with his stage adaptation of the Elizabethan drama by the similarly precocious Marlowe.
Director-editor Orson cut Marlowe's original five acts to one, whose 15 scenes ran 75 to 85 minutes without either the conventional intermission or usual curtains between scenes. He cast mulatto actor Jack Carter (the star of Voodoo Macbeth) as Mephistophilis. Seizing his first chance on stage to play a master magician – albeit a supernatural one – Orson took the lead role as Faustus.68 And, as he later told a magician friend, he consciously used this opportunity to conjure,69 although in ways so unconventional that neither his lay audiences nor the critics would recognize.
Specifically he chose to do an “all Black-Art show"70 by setting his play completely within a conjurors' Black Art stage. Black Art (B.A.) is their jargon for achieving invisibility based on the principle of camouflage that adjacent objects of same color and tone are, in the absence of shadow, seen by the human eye as a single object. Thus a black object against a black background is invisible. Other matched colors work, but a non-shiny black is the easiest to control because it reflects the least amount of light.
{SIDEBAR:} BLACK ART. Although magicians had long applied the B.A. principle to small tricks, it was first extended to the entire stage by late-19th century German theatrical manager Max Auzinger. He'd discovered it by chance while watching a play and noticing that the white teeth of a black-face actor in a dark dungeon seemed disembodied and flashed on and off when the actor opened and closed his mouth. In 1885 Auzinger premiered the world's first full-stage Black Art act at the Passage-Panoptikum in Berlin. Performing initially as “Maxistan A. Uzinger" and later as “Ben Ali Bey", he called it the Schwarze Kabinett (Black Cabinet). Auzinger taught the secret to his Austrian employer, Charles Arbré, who exhibited it the following year in Hamburg.
Soon afterwards, two Continental performers appeared, fresh from Germany, in Canada where they attempted unsuccessfully to get funding to put on this type of act. However, copy-cat billed as “Ben Ali Bey", they did manage to premier it in the USA in 1886 at the Miners Bowery Theater in New York City. The B.A. stage was introduced in Britain later that year when Buatier De Kolta performed his patented “Modern Black Magic" act at the Egyptian Hall in London. De Kolta had independently reinvented the method the previous fall from reports of Auzinger's effect.
Tod ogconcobcouhe pmeahim2@
200
A Gallup poll showed that 28% of the audience, mistaking fiction for reality, believed they'd been listening to real news reports.201 Our Magic Man was fascinated to learn that the public could be more easily gulled than even he'd imagined. The hour-long show had used the realistic “news bulletin" format for less than 40 minutes. Any coolly rational person who had tuned in during that period would soon perceive that the “news" events were tumbling out of the radio speaker far faster than would be possible in the real world: The “launchings" from the distant planet, the “invasion", and the “defensive mobilization" were all happening far too fast. Orson had compressed actions that would take days into little more than a half hour.
Nearly four decades later when asked by one of his movie magic crews whether he felt any remorse about the suicides caused by the panic (20 had been reported), he replied haughtily, “If they had tuned in on time, they would have lived."202 But Orson was just taking advantage of that crew's gullible acceptance of yet another Wellesian myth. His seemingly callous remark was fabricated for maximum shock effect—he'd always known from CBS's nervous lawyers that there'd been no verified deaths, suicides or otherwise, attributable to that show.
192 France (1977), 179.
193OW as from a recording of the original broadcast. And as in the reprinted script in Cantril (1940), 43.
194Brady (1989), 173-174. But Houseman (1948), 82, says the press photo was taken at the theater that night. The photo is reproduced in Barnouw (1968), following p.90.
195Houseman (1948), 82; Houseman (1972), 404-405.
196Brady (1989), 164.
197Brady (1989), 548.
198OW in With Orson Welles (1982).
199Luncheon conversation with Levy, 28 Apr 91.
200OW in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 18-20.
201Cantril (1940), 57-59.
202Paul Butler interview, 6 Oct 91, based on a review that day of one of his five audio tapes of Orson on the set on that occasion in 1977; also Abb Dickson interview, 25 Sep 92, based on memory of a similar remark on a different occasion.
Calling the broadcast “technically brilliant", John Houseman summed it up with, for once, nearly undiluted praise:203
"The War of the Worlds" was a magic act, one of the world's greatest, and Orson was just the man to bring it off. For Welles is at heart a magician whose particular talent lies not so much in his creative imagination (which is considerable) as in his proven ability to stretch the familiar elements of theatrical effect far beyond their normal point of tension. For this reason his productions require more elaborate preparation and more perfect execution than most. At that—like all complicated magic tricks—they remain, till the last minute, in a state of precarious balance. When they come off, they give—by virtue of their unusually high intensity—an impression of great brilliance and power; when they fail—when something in their balance goes wrong or the original structure proves to have been unsound—they provoke, among their audience, a particularly violent reaction of unease and revulsion. Welles' flops are louder than other men's. The Mars broadcast was one of his unqualified successes.
The most obvious consequence of the War of the Worlds broadcast was that it greatly enhanced Orson’s fame, moving him up a notch in the celebrity ladder. That’s no doubt how he came to first meet movie superstar Cary Grant. It was at Lynn Sercus’s birthday party on November 24th at Manhattan’s fashionable “21" Club. Orson was "in".204
The only unhappy consequence of his instant War of the Worlds' fame with CBS was that the rival Mutual Broadcasting System, wanting an anonymous actor, fired him as The Shadow.205
{SIDEBAR:} Precedents or Inspirations?
One British evening, twelve years before Orson's War of the Worlds, a BBC radio broadcast of a dull speech was interrupted by a string of news flashes concerning a devastating riot by the unemployed: The Houses of Parliament are being demolished by an angry mob equipped with trench mortars. The clock tower 320 feet in height has just fallen to the ground, together with the famous clock, Big Ben.... One moment please. Fresh reports announce that the crowd has secured the person of Mr. Wurtherspoon, the minister of traffic, who was attempting to make his escape in disguise. He has now been hanged from a lamp post in Vauxhall. [NEW VOICE:] London calling. That noise you heard just now was the Savoy Hotel being blown up by the crowd.
Panicked listeners rushed to telephones or telegraph offices to discover the fate of family and friends. The Admiralty was asked when the Fleet would arrive in the Thames to suppress this totally unexpected uprising (led by a Mr. Popplebury, secretary of the National Movement for Abolishing The
atre Queues). Official denials were met with an incredulous “But we heard it on the BBC." They had, but failed to heed the preceding announcement by that cunning writer of mystery novels, Rev. Ronald Knox, that they were about to hear a burlesque of certain current political-economic problems.206
Then in the early 1930s in far off California, a local CBS radio show titled If Radio Had Been Invented included a dramatized script of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. According to the producer, Pat Weaver (future father of Sigourney Weaver), although there were frequent interruptions to stress its fictional re-enactment, some listeners mistook the broadcast for live news.207
203 Houseman (1948), 79-80. Also quoted in Noble (1956), 116-117. Incorporated with trivial changes in Houseman (1972), 400.
204Menu of 21 Club autographed by OW, Cary Grant, etc. as reported in American Book Prices Current 1993-1994.
205Harmon (1967), 59; Goulart (1990), 329.
206Curtis D. Mac Dougall, Hoaxes (2nd edition, New York: Dover, 1958), 42-44.
On 12 Dec 1937 Orson acted in an episode of The Shadow radio show titled “The Death Triangle”. To build suspense, the dialogue is “interrupted” at one point by a simulated news bulletin announcing (incorrectly)) the death of the Shadow. I don’t know who contributed this bit. Orson never contributed to the scripts, reading them cold on his arrival in the studio. Although the title, “The Death Triangle” had been used by Walter B. Gibson for one of his novelettes that he’d published in 1933 in The Shadow magazine, the radio version is an entirely different story. Gibson was story consultant on the radio series but was relatively inactive in that role. Another possibility is Edward Hale Bierstadt who began as main writer that season but was soon fired. The most likely possibility is famous radio writer Edith Meiser who was story editor on all the broadcasts that season and wrote some herself.
Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1 Page 10