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Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1

Page 14

by Barton Whaley


  22 Tichi Wilkerson & Marcia Borie` The Hollywood Reporter: The Glden Years (New York: Coward-McCann, 1984) , 124.

  23Shirley Temple Black, Child Star: An Autobiography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 283-285.

  24OW interview in Meryman (1978), 299.

  25Houseman (1972), 434.

  261969 interview in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 43.

  OW: Later. When I first came out, Errol was one of the leaders of the anti-Welles faction. Ward Bond was another.

  PB: Then you mainly kept the beard for its irritation value?

  OW: Let’s say that I didn’t fancy the idea of collaborating with prejudice.

  Errol Flynn writes a similar scenario in his autobiography.27 But little did Orson care what the public thought of him, as long as they thought of him. His reputation for outrageous behavior had considerable publicity value and playing “camp” was just part of his game. However, his timing was off. As far as tolerance for homosexuality went, Hollywood had gone. The Roaring Twenties had given way to moralistic censorship in 1934 when gays and lesbians nervously retreated into their closets and fornication, adultery, kinky sex, orgies, debauchery, and similar delights went back underground.28

  But Orson was quick to win over many of the local reporters by obliging with quotable tidbits. Items such as “Hollywood is like the main street of any small town, complete with gossips—except that the gossips are syndicated!"29

  Dr. Bernstein, also pursuing a good thing, visited movieland that September and passed the California state medical exams in preparation for a permanent move to Beverly Hills. Basking in Orson's reflected fame, he tried to fob off a fictitious biographical sketch of his former ward onto the Mercury publicist but without success.30 However, he was able to pad the growing Wellesian mythology by feeding the voracious journalists exaggerated stories or such downright false ones as that the Baby Genius had learned to read at age two (much later, according to Orson who modestly described himself as a “rather backward" reader).31 But it was the colorful falsehoods that ended up in the clipping files to mislead platoons of critics and biographers to this day.

  Although Orson had left the stage for the movies, he continued to make most of his money in radio—now some $5,000 per week (more than a year's salary for any blue-collar worker and most whitecollar ones). He earned this large sum by flying every Thursday night in one of TWA's new Douglas DC3s overnight LA-to-Newark. After this 16-hour haul (often longer when grounded by bad weather along the route), thence by the Holland Tunnel to Manhattan. There he starred in The Campbell Playhouse on CBS's Sunday night one-hour live drama—plus a live repeat for the West Coast, returning to LA the next day. This tough schedule ran from September until mid-November when Playhouse moved across the continent to Hollywood to accommodate him.

  * * * The “dream factory", as everyone including Orson called the Hollywood system in those days, was indeed an assembly line. Its 255,000 workers annually pumped out over five hundred films costing $125 million to fill the demands of the world’s 67,000 motion picture theaters. Of these, America’s share was 17,000 movie houses with 10,500,000 seats in 8,500 cities and towns. Each of the five major studios was a self-contained unit with its long-term contract crew of producers, directors, writers, actors, technicians, designers, and carpenters huddled around its own production facilities that included sound stages, cutting rooms, screening rooms, and warehouses for wardrobe and props. Fine films were being made abroad; but Hollywood led world cinema in quantity, technology, and technical skill.32 Orson immersed himself in this complex world, quickly grasping its modern methods and, more slowly and imperfectly, its byzantine politics.

  27 Flynn (1960).

  28Useful studies are David Ehrenstein, Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 1928-1998 (New York: Morrow, 1998); Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (London: Cambridge U.P., 1994); and William J. Mann, Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, Hollywood’s First Openly Gay Star (New York: Viking, 1998).

  29OW in Noble (1956), 128.

  30Higham (1985), 52, 139; Johnston & Smith (1940), I, 96, etc.

  31OW in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 69.

  He began by studying the arcane language of movies from a book of stills with a glossary of film jargon specially compiled for him by an RKO-assigned aide. Then, for much of August and September, he spent three hours a day picking the brains of the top studio techs,33 particularly during many repeat screenings of John Ford's recent Stagecoach where a different type of technician would be present at each viewing to explain where and how his particular specialty applied. After this in-depth survey of RKO's technical capabilities he told his

  personal assistant, Richard Wilson, “This is the biggest electric train set any boy ever had."34 One of the persistent Wellesian myths is that at RKO he closely studied the films of the top directors of the day: Hitchcock, Lang, Clair, Vidor, Capra, Ford, and others. This oft-told tale wasn't challenged until the posthumous publication of Orson's own explanation. Yes, he’d seen these directors' films, but before going to Hollywood and only like any other movie fan. And with no expectation or intention of ever directing one himself. He hadn't even bothered to learn until later who had directed some of his favorite flicks. The only film he'd screened specifically to study movie-making techniques was John Ford's Stagecoach – 40 times he’d once claimed.35 He did view other movies at RKO but merely to spot suitable actors or to save money by finding location footage or other stock clips that could be pasted into his own film, as several would indeed be.

  MANKY PANKY Orson hired a local writer, a 43-year-old disgruntled transplant from New York City. For a paltry sum he got the notorious Herman J. Mankiewicz. The two had met the previous year in New York over lunch at “21" and formed an instant mutual admiration club.36 Houseman viewed this budding fellowship with jealousy and would eventually use an opportunity to pry these buddies apart.

  Mank, Manky, or Mankie was what he was variously called by his few remaining friends and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that enemies spelled it "Manqué". He'd been a top Hollywood film writer in the early ‘30s when he was earning up to $3,000 per week. But his run-away cruel wit plus excessive boozing and gambling had gotten him fired from three of the studios and black-listed by both others.37 Orson recognized that:38

  Mank’s humor certainly didn’t come from the fact that he found the world irresistibly entertaining and funny. He simply could express his hatred best and most eloquently in terms of humor.

  32 The best study of Hollywood movie world at the time of Orson’s arrival is Rosten (1941). A general account of the Hollywood studio system during those "golden years" is Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System (New York: Pantheon, 1988). On RKO Radio Pictures see Richard B. Jewell and Vernon Harbin, The RKO Story (New York: Arlington House, 1982).

  33 Miriam Geiger interview of 31 Jan 83 in Leaming (1985), 173, 174.

  34Of the many quoted variants of this line, I've selected that in Noble (1956), 126, as the circumstantially most accurate. Compare the WellesBogdanovich (1992), Tape 1, Side 2, where Orson says he first made this remark to Alva Johnston after making Kane. But Johnston himself wrote in 1939 (before Kane was even begun) that Orson had made the remark to "a New York friend ... at the RKO studio." See Johnston & Smith (1940), III, 40. See also Rosten (1941),51; Fowler (1946), 35; and Brady (1989), 208.

  35OW in Cowie (1965), 27; OW in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 29.

  36Houseman letter to Sara Mankiewicz as quoted in Brady (1989), 234.

  37Houseman interview in Meryman (1978), 240-241.

  38OW interview in Meryman (1978), 165.

  Mank couldn’t understand that people saw through his superficially playful wit to the underlying willful sarcasm. Consequently, like Orson with so many of his practical jokes, he was surprised and disappointed when his targets responded with anger. Orson, understanding that it was just part of the man’s compulsive bitterness, never took Mank’s rages personally
.

  Now Mank was in an LA hospital mending a shattered right leg when in September Orson visited and decided to rescue the desperate, down-and-out, has-been. Orson hired him, ostensibly to help Houseman with adapting classic novels for the weekly Campbell Playhouse show. Mank was to write radio scripts at $200 each. Because the shows were billed as written, produced, and directed by Orson Welles, Mank was required to forego writer’s credit. Desperate for money, he agreed, thus becoming Orson’s most illustrious charity case. “I felt”, Orson would recall, that hiring him “would be useless, because of Mank’s general uselessness many times in the studios. But I thought, ‘We’ll see what comes up.’”39 What came up was five completed scripts, although Houseman recalled having to edit the first couple “rather harshly.”40 And later, much more from Mank would come up — some good but much bad.

  * * * Given Orson's rosy expectation that he'd be busy filming within three or so months of his arrival in Hollywood, he began to gather his proven and trusted cadre of New York stage and radio staff and actors around him. The first wave of Mercurian immigrants comprised stage manager Richard Wilson, burlesque comic Gus Schilling, actors Everett Sloane, George Coulouris, Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, Norman Lloyd, Edgar Barrier, Jack Carter, Stefan Schnabel, Frank "The Shadow Knows!" Readick, Agnes Moorehead, and Shakespearean John Emery. By October they were all in place — most at the Villa Carlotta apartment hotel on Franklin Avenue in the Hollywood foothills. And there they waited—and waited—for Orson to get his show going. At least the wait was made tolerable because they were all on payroll with, at least in Lloyd’s case, a six-week guarantee at $500 per week.41

  Since moving West Orson had been scouting suitable plots for his debut full-length movie. Reading quickly and widely, several candidates emerged. For his first all-speed-ahead pre-production effort Orson chose Joseph Conrad's somber novella, Heart of Darkness. On the last day of November Orson completed revisions on what would become the first of his many screenplays. But, because RKO estimated it would cost more than the pre-approved $500,000, it was cancelled –- to later be adopted as the basis of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

  Four decades later Orson’s old untitled script let Professor James Naremore reveal Orson's radical notion of what his Hollywood debut might have been. He believed that a movie, every movie, is a magic trick. All we really see projected on the big silverized screen is what a standard movie camera has been designed to show as a sequence of 24 still pictures (“frames") per second. At that speed all human brains accept an illusion of visual continuity. Conventional wisdom in Hollywood at that time dictated that the techniques of movie illusion be as unobtrusive as possible. Orson's very unconventional wisdom was that “a good magician can be appreciated if you know something about the skill involved in creating his tricks." Consequently, as Naremore concluded, “Welles' approach ... cut against the grain of the impersonal factory style, serving both as an entertaining device and as a commentary upon the illusory, potentially authoritarian nature of the medium."42

  39OW interview in Meryman (1978), 241.

  40Houseman (1972), 448. Mank’s scripts (with their broadcast dates) were: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (12 Nov 1939), Dodsworth (26 Nov 1939), Vanity Fair (7 Jan 1940), Huckleberry Finn (17 Mar 1940), and Rip Van Winkle, which does not seem to have been produced. 41Richard Wilson interview in Action (May-Jun 1969), 27; Lloyd (1990), 65-67; Carringer (1985), 6-8.. The most original and unusual element of Orson's concept for this movie was to let the camera, or rather its vision, become one of the main actors — free to roam from one room to another and upstairs, and etcetera.43 This type of cinematographic movement required a light-weight, small hand-held machine of a type that didn't exist at that time. But Orson ran tests with a heavy movie camera on a shoulder mount, the first ever seen by the head of RKO's dubbing department. It almost worked.44 Two decades later the French would succeed with cinéma vérité or, as it was also called, Direct Cinema.

  Director Alfred Hitchcock was contemptuous of this I-am-a-camera game:45 Young directors always come up with the idea, "Let the camera be someone and let it move as though it's the person, and you put the guy in front of a mirror and then you see him." It's a terrible mistake. Bob Montgomery did that in Lady in the Lake [1946] — I don't believe in it myself. What are you really doing? You are keeping back from the audience who it is. What for? That's all you are doing. Why not show who it is?

  Even the Lady's author-scripter, the great Raymond Chandler himself, broke with the studio in part over this point, writing later that:46 The camera eye technique of Lady in the Lake is old stuff in Hollywood. Every young writer or director has wanted to try it. "Let's make the camera a character"; it's been said at every lunch table in Hollywood at one time or another. I know one fellow who wanted to make the camera the murderer; which wouldn't work without an awful lot of fraud. The camera is too honest.

  Could Orson have carried off this daring trick? Just maybe. We'll never know. But I am struck by the fact that Orson would come close to letting the audience see these same normally hidden mechanics of illusion in a film he did finish 43 years later, F for Fake.

  * * * With Heart of Darkness killed, Orson's renewed his search for a suitable movie topic. He settled on The Smiler With a Knife, a recent anti-fascist political thriller by English poet-novelist C. Day Lewis writing as “Nicholas Blake”. Orson began editing that book into a filmscript.

  42 Naremore (1978), 23.

  43Naremore (1978), 21-23; Carringer (1985), 8-11.

  44James G. Stewart interview in Action (May-Jun 1969), 31.

  45Hitchcock 1963 interview in Peter Bogdanovich, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Museum of Modern Art Film Library, 1963), 4.

  46Chandler letter of 16 Apr 1949 as quoted in Gardiner & Walker, Raymond Chandler Speaking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997 edition), 132.

  In mid-November Orson switched Herman Mankiewicz over from radio writing to help him doctor the Smiler script. Although enjoying this new collaboration, Orson sensed that Mank had been trying:47

  to show that writing a film script was one thing I couldn’t do and also one thing I had better come to him for. He destroyed my confidence in the script, sneering at everything I did, saying, “That will never work.”

  It didn’t. So The Smiler project soon got put on hold, never to be revived. Three possible new movie projects that emerged centered around major figures of the Italian Renaissance: Leonardo da Vinci, Girolamo Savonarola, and—most appropriately for a machiavellian—that great teacher of deception, Niccolò Machiavelli himself. Indeed, this subject intrigued Orson enough to register the title The Life of Machiavelli with the Motion Picture Producers Association as a possible movie for him to direct and star in.48

  But Orson had already begun moving toward another film project that would soon sweep all the others into history’s unforgiving dust bin. It was based, Skipper Hill would recall, on Orson’s original idea for a play he'd outlined to Skipper years before—the life of an American tycoon who’d be a composite of three extraordinary and extraordinarily powerful men: Chicago billionaire industrialist Samuel Insull, Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick, and San Francisco newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.49 Knowing he was no good at thinking up catchy titles, Orson sought help until RKO Radio Picture's ever-helpful vice-president George Schaefer suggested one that stuck: Citizen Kane.

  But this title came much later. First came the infamous script. It had germinated from December 1939 through late January during frequent and lengthy evening brain-storming sessions between Orson and Herman Mankiewicz. These took place in the bedroom of Mank’s tiny house (rented from large actor Laird Cregar) on Roxbury in south Beverly Hills. Mank, leg in cast, lay on his small hospital-type traction-bed. The only place to sit was on Mank’s wife Sara’s bed. Whenever Orson arrived to find the darkly beautiful Sara propped up on pillows reading, he’d say, “Move over,” sprawl on the bed, and massage her neck from time to t
ime while talking with her husband. Sara found him “fun” and “magnetic”. And Mank, inspired by Orson’s enthusiasm, found his old genius for writing reemerge while they shouted ideas back-and-forth in true collaboration.

  After much of the plot and the main characters for the future Citizen Kane had emerged from his many evening sessions with Mank, Orson decided to press ahead full steam on this project. Mank formally signed on with Mercury as the scriptwriter at $1,000 per week and Orson brought Houseman back from the East Coast to ramrod Mank’s writing. Houseman went back on the Mercury payroll on February 19th.

  In addition to Hearst, Mank also had a crucial tie to Samuel Insull – in 1925 as theater reviewer for New York Times, he’d drafted an unacceptable review of Insull’s wife’s performance in a play. His drunken effort, which almost got him fired, became the basis of the famous scene in Kane where Jo Cotten does get fired over his failed review of Kane’s wife’s operatic debut.50

  47 OW interview in Meryman (1978), 245.

  48Brady (1989), 217.

  49Hill (1977), 111. It is astonishing that this rather easily accessible primary source for the origin of the Kane plot has passed unremarked and evidently unnoticed. Even if we dismiss it as an old and faulty memory, it deserves mention.

  Orson entered into the collaboration with his own agenda. Skipper Hill would recall that Orson had told him years earlier of his idea for a movie about a press lord who would blend the experiences of Insull, McCormick, and Hearst. And this was precisely the type of role that Orson had usually sought for himself as a “king actor”,51 namely a monster with enough humanity to engage at least some sliver of sympathy.

  Whoever connected this notion to Kane, it evidently was one of those ideas that was already “in the air”. For example, as early as 1938 English movie star Leslie Howard had announced in the trade press that:52

  My next film will be the psychological study of a newspaper baron –- a man with a chain of newspapers whose power is sufficiently great to change the policy of the Government and alter the shape of Europe.

 

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