Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1

by Barton Whaley

  The American stage team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne performed together from 1923 to 1960, but I don’t know when they started using their trademark overlapped conversations but it was certainly well before 1957, perhaps as early as 1 Jan 1929 when Brooks Atkinsons commented in The New York Times on the way they “run their lines together”. As Miss Fontanne would later say, “We started overlapping our speeches because we know each other so well, it was the natural thing to do.”186)

  LIGHTNING MIXES (= “CROSS FADE” IN RADIO JARGON) where the sounds in one scene or the words of one character are cut off abruptly in mid-scene and completed by another character in the next. This, Naremore says, is an extension of Slavko Vorkapich's montage technique as often used in Hollywood films of the 1930's including Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932) and Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935). In The Thirty-nine Steps (1935) Hitchcock effectively used a sound switch from the scream of a terrified woman to the screech of a train's steam whistle.

  DUBBING = LOOPING (ADDING SOUND DURING POST-PRODUCTION): Used sometimes in Kane, but much more often by Orson in his later films, beginning with Ambersons (1942). For example, most of Othello (1952) and all of The Trial (1963) were dubbed. Dubbing has always been more common in Europe than America but Orson, with his keen sense of how sound works dramatically, was exceptional in both settings. Thus both Charlton Heston and Anthony Perkins credit him with having made them aware of dubbing as a creative, even exciting post-production art, and not merely some kind of band-aid for botched sound during the filming.187

  THE REPORTER'S RASHOMON-LIKE MULTIPLE (FIVE) POINTS OF VIEW THAT EMERGE DURING THE INVESTIGATION OF KANE'S PERSONALITY: The Japanese short story, “Rashomon" (1915; English translation 1930) by Ryunosuke Akutagawa was a murder story told by the four eye-witnesses. Also, according to Bazin, certain novels (unspecified). The earliest such novel I've found was British author Claude Houghton’s I Am Jonathan Scrivener (1930). It explored the elusive protagonist’s life from the viewpoints of several people who knew him. Richard France notes that the 1931 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Alison's House by Susan Glaspell, had a reporter interview the protagonist's survivors with differing results from each and suggests that Orson had likely seen or at least known of Glaspell’s play. At any event Orson adopted this device in 1932 in his own unproduced play script, Marching Song. Multiple viewpoints first appeared on film in 1933 in two movies: William K. Howard's The Power and The Glory from Preston Sturges' script, a movie Orson said he'd never seen; and in Phil Goldstone’s The Sin of Nora Moran, which starred John Houseman’s wife, Zita Johann. And in the mid’30s (by 1937) even Herman Mankiewicz drafted the first act of a never-produced play titled The Tree Will Grow as a portrait of recently (1934) killed gangster Dillinger constructed from the conflicting memoirs of people who’d known him. The technique was introduced to radio in 1936 in writer-director Arch Oboler’s first script, “Burial Services,” for his Lights Out midnight show.188

  180 Ditto, as quoted from Lebo (1990), 207.

  181Bernard Herrmann, "Score for a Film", New York Times (25 May 1941) as reprinted in Lebo (1990), 208.

  182Particularly as noted by Arthur Knight in Action (May-Jun 1969) as quoted in Thomas (1973), 16.

  183Dillman (1997), 89.

  184Heston interview in Take One (Jul-Aug 1971, 10

  185Dwan interview in Bogdanovich (1971), 84.

  186George Freedley, The Lunts (London: Rockliff, 1957), 55, 94.

  Orson often said he’d originally wanted a strictly multiple viewpoint plot in Citizen Kane but that tour-de-force became diluted by Mankiewicz with Orson's approval. Kane itself was told from five perspectives.

  Subsequent uses of this device in cinema include Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), which was based on the 1915 Akutagawa story; Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950); Minelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952); J. Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954), which gave two differing eyewitness accounts of the separation scene; and Kubrick’s The Killing (1956, as retained from Lionel White’s 1955 novel, Clean Break), which was told from the viewpoint of the six participants in a racetrack heist. FLASHBACKS: Francis Ford’s The Burning Brand (1912); John Ford’s The Face on the Barroom Floor (1923); Korda’s Das unbekannte Morgen (1923); Dupont's Variete (1925); Ford’s The Black Watch (1929), Sturges' The Power and the Glory (1933); Phil Goldstone’s The Sin of Nora Moran (1933, including flashbacks within flashbacks and flash forwards); Sidney Howard's Broadway play Yellow Jack (1934); Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1935), Sacha Guitry's Le Roman d'un tricheur (1936); Carné’s Le Jour se lève (1939). Orson planned to use multiple flashbacks again in The Stranger (1946, but not as cut by the studio) and again in his unfinished 1954 cut of Mr. Arkadin.

  Noël Coward would be inspired by seeing Kane to adopt the flashback technique in his film script for David Lean’s In Which We Serve (1942).189 Other later uses include Casablanca (1942) and scriptwriter Hugo Butler’s From This Day Forward (1945).

  INTRICATE JUMPS IN TIME: Repeated in many of Orson's later films.

  INCORPORATING A MARCH OF TIME-TYPE NEWSREEL: Orson had planned to project stereopticon slides of newspaper headlines to introduce his protagonist during his 1932 Marching Song play; he induced producer-director Sidney Kingsley to project newsreel shots on stage in Ten Million Ghosts in 1936; had himself played dramatic roles in the March of Time radio series in 1938; and had even planned a newsreel introduction for his protagonist in Smiler with a Knife in 1940. This device had also been used in such movies as Litvak's Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939); and postKane in Casablanca (1942) and Brownlow's It Happened Here (1966).

  187 Heston interview in Chase (1975), Heston (1978), 113; Perkins interview in Films & Filming (Jul 1965) as quoted in Leyda (1977), 354.

  188Oboler interview in Maltin (1997), 49.

  189Kevin Brownlow, David Lean (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 154.

  Even otherwise technically conventional wipes and dissolves and, as described above, vertical boom shots in Kane were often used to fresh effect.190

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  * * * Four days later Orson, still in Hollywood, attended a regular meeting of Los Magicos hosted by friend and ventriloquist star friend Edgar Bergen. As usual at these gatherings, several members would perform. Orson didn't perform this time; but he good-naturedly acted as designated stooge for those who needed one, particularly in Larry Grey's comedy magic routine.191

  Some five months further along, around the beginning of October, it was Orson's turn to host—a lavish buffet at Perino's gourmet restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard. The occasion being “Martian Magic Night", that theme was employed by most performing members and guests. Thus magic dealer Len Gunn did Orson's own Man From Mars card effect, Chester Morris performed with a “Martian" handkerchief, Gerald Kosky did a Mars-themed card trick, and Max Terhune demonstrated how Martians play poker. Other performers included Los Magicos regulars Jim Conley, Bill McCaffrey, Bill Taylor, and Henry Usher as well as guest Bob Nelson. The host closed the festive evening with a recording of his War of the Worlds.192

  With Kane unleashed Orson worked and relaxed in Hollywood. On June 22nd Stalin saw his Faustian pact with Hitler broken when he launched his surprise invasion of Russia. Overnight the world’s Communist parties switched back to clamoring for America to ally itself against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Orson welcomed this new Party line. Consequently, just three days later, he attended Blitzstein’s recital at Communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s home in Beverly Hills with Dorothy Comingore and the John Garfields.193

  * * * On July 10th Duke Ellington and his 14-piece orchestra had premiered their “Jump for Joy” musical at downtown LA’s gaudy Mayan Theatre. Ellington had intended “a statement of social protest” but subtly rendered by steering wide of the then standard Hollywood or Cotton Club. He deplored even the comfortable types of Negro stereotyping by Northern white liberal such as Marc Connelly’s Green Pastures (1929) or the Gershwins’s Porgy and Bess
(1935).194

  On opening night Ellington recognized Orson sitting in the front row with Dolores del Río. After the show, Orson left word he wanted to meet Ellington to discuss work on a motion picture, suggesting his office at RKO next morning. When Ellington appeared there, Orson started by saying that Duke’s show was “great” and then launched on a lengthy and detailed critique of what was wrong about it. Ellington was amazed how “He went through the show from the first curtain to the last curtain, blow by blow, every number, every sketch, all of it coming from his mind without notes—and he saw it once! It was both a review and a mass of suggestions.”195

  190 As noted by Cowie (1973), 48-49.

  191Rudy Miller column in Genii, Vol.5, No.10 (Jun 1941), 333.

  192Rudy Miller column in Genii, Vol.6, No.3 (Nov 1941), 93. Although Miller reports the title as "The Man From Mars", Orson's only known Mars-related recording was titled War of the Worlds.

  193Gordon (1989), 209.

  194Denning (1996), 309-319; Ellington (1973), 175-180..

  Was Ellington offended? On the contrary. “It was,” he recalled, “the most impressive display of mental power I’ve ever experienced—just pure genius.”196 And the admiration was mutual. In addition to returning again and again during the show’s 101 performances in its nearly 12-week run to hear and watch this great musician, Orson reportedly later characterized Ellington as the only other“genius" he'd ever met.197

  Orson's many contacts with jazz music and its players and composers inspired his plans to make a full-length semi-documentary movie that he'd begun calling The Story of Jazz. This was the project he now invited Ellington to join. Ellington accepted, was hired on at $1,000 per week (with an extra $500 for the last week), offered a role in the film with his band whose members would be paid, and given ownership of any music he composed for the movie.198 The story would trace the history of jazz. This historical element would feature the life of Louis Armstrong, as Orson and Armstrong had previously agreed.199 Prominent black jazz singer-pianist Hazel Scott agreed to play the part of Armstrong’s ex-wife, singer-pianist Lil Hardin Armstrong.200

  Ellington immediately began work, even before his 12-weeks at the Mayan ended on 27 September. He started by researching “all the books on jazz [history] that had been written up to 1941" — his personal library of 800 books. But, disliking what he read as too narrowly focused on the traditional New Orleans style, planned the history from his own viewpoint. But, as Ellington recalled:201

  I'd written just twenty-eight bars of trumpet solo [for the Buddy Bolden scene] when RKO cancelled Orson's contract. But I automatically go on accumulating material, and that solo ended up [in 1956] as a forty-minute composition called A Drum is a Woman.

  He’s also dictated as “treatment” for Jump for Joy, which I presume was to be incorporated.202 Ellington had worked a total of 12 weeks for which he was paid $12,500 as “technical director”. Other jazz figures, reportedly including Armstrong and Scott, had received an additional $12,250. Ellington concluded in 1960 that:203

  Mr Welles is a great man; I am sorry his project never materialized. If he were being subsidized today as he was then, perhaps I would be in Rome now, writing my history of jazz.

  So Orson's The Story of Jazz became another unfinished dream.204

  195 Ellington (1973), 175, 239-240. Also Ellington (1955), 10; and Nicholson (1999), 235..

  196Ellington (1973), 240.

  197Maurice Zolotow, “The Duke of Hot,” Saturday Evening Post, Vol.216, No.6 (7 Aug 1943),, 69; Derek Jewell, Duke: A Portrait of Duke Ellington (New York: Norton, 1977), 78.

  198Ellington (1955),10, 11; Nicholson (1999), 235-236; Brady (1989), 334.

  199Ellington 1941 interview quoted in Mark Tucker (editor), The Duke Ellington Reader (New York: Oxford UP,1993), 149.

  200“Lil Armstrong Snubbed by Hollywood! Louis’s Picture Will Have Hazel Scott in Big Role,” Down Beat, Vol..8, No.19 (1 Oct 1941), 4.

  201Ellington 1965 interview with Tynan (1967), 338. This extended piece was made up of 13 separate piceces, all composed with Billy Strayhorn. Ellington premiered it in 1956 on American TV.

  202Thispreviously unnoticed treatment is preserved in the Lilly Library, Welles MSS, Films, Box 16, folders 13-26.

  203Ellington (1960), 14.

  One day two years later Orson and Duke Ellington would make a second try in Manhattan. Orson had stopped by the Capitol Theatre where Ellington and his orchestra with Lena Horne were performing. Orson went backstage to talk with the jazz maestro. He proposed they collaborate on a musical version of Aesop’s Fables. But this too was never followed up.205 Their intermittent relationship would end four years later on a happy note when, as we’ll see later, the two met in Paris.

  Orson first met the great black American jazz singer, Billie Holiday, that October. At age 26, 29 days older than Orson, newly married, and not yet a slave to hard drugs, this was her first appearance on the West Coast. There in the San Fernando Valley above Los Angeles, on October 1st, she opened the brand new nightclub, The Café Society. She’d been booked indefinitely at $175 per week to sing short sets backed by the club’s resident band, a collection of movie studio musicians led by trumpeter Al Golden. Co-owner Jerry Colonna, a popular trombonist turned movie and radio comedian arranged for the Hollywood elite to turn up.206 Billie would recall meeting Orson at the club:207

  I liked him and he liked me, and jazz. We started hanging around together. So when I’d finished at the joint in the valley, we’d head for Central Avenue, the Negro ghetto of Los Angeles, and I’d take him around all the joints and dives. ... I was bored but he loved it. There wasn’t a damn thing or person he wasn’t interested in. He wanted to see everything and find out who and why it ticked. I guess that’s part of what made him a great artist. ...

  After we’d been seen together a few times I started getting phone calls at my hotel telling me I was ruining Orson’s career by being seen with him. People used to bug me, saying the studio would get after me, that I’d never get to work in pictures, and God knows what, if I didn’t leave him alone. The hotel used to get the same kind of calls from people trying to make trouble for me or for him.

  A lot of people have been dogging Orson Welles ever since but they can’t touch him. He’s a fine cat — probably the finest I ever met. And a talented cat. But more than that, he’s fine people.

  Billie was flattered when Orson told her he wanted her in his planned history of jazz segment of It’s All True. Orson even took her along to the CBS studios to watch him direct his Orson Welles Almanac radio-theater show.208 But their plans went on hold, never to be revived, when after just three weeks Barney Josephson’s original Café Society in New York legally forced the copy-cat’s closing and Billie had to return to New York.

  * * * The summer also brought two welcome changes at Mercury Productions. First, it had moved its offices from RKO's Gower Street office building to RKO's Pathé Studios in Culver City where Orson and his gang occupied Gloria Swanson's old bungalow while preparing to film his second movie. Second, and more importantly, the Mercury got a replacement for Houseman.

  204 Wood (1990), 176-179.

  205Don George, Sweet Man: The Real Duke Ellington (New York: Putnam’s., 1981), 20.

  206Holiday (1956), Ch.10; John Chilton, Billie’s Blues (New York: Stein & Day, 1975), 78-79, 82-83; Nicholson (1995), 123. Although Chilton’s bio indicates their meeting took place while she was on her second LA appearance at Berg’s Trouville Club in May-Jul 1942 Orson was in South American that entire time.

  207Holiday (1956), Ch.10.

  208Holiday (1956), Ch.10, mistakenly recalls him showing her bits of Citizen Kane before its official release — in fact Kane had already been out a few months when they met. Brady (1989), 333-334., mistakenly has Orson bring her to the RKO studio to watch him direct a movie — in fact he was then between movies. Brady also says he “informally auditioned Billie Holiday to perform in the film.” True, if by informally Brady means h
e heard her sing at the Cafe Society.

  That season Orson had sought a new business manager; and, having already accepted a summer booking to do a conjuring act at the California State Fair, he also wanted someone to give him his first formal lessons in magic. In late August he found both in Jack Moss whom he had already dealt with as a co-producer (uncredited) on Native Son. A dour and clever New Yorker, Moss was an ex-professional magician. And he'd been an associate producer in Hollywood until 1931 when he became Gary Cooper's personal manager, helping greatly in guiding Coop's career to the peaks of stardom up to 1939 when Moss moved briefly to Paramount as a producer and thence in the same capacity to Columbia. He was energetic and short with a thick neck, pudgy body, and weak eyes that required glasses. His motto was “The only time we have control is when they who have control want us to think we have control." Orson would have appreciated such a Machiavellian statement but rejected its cynicism. Moss's mildly leftist beliefs would bring hurt during the McCarthyite anti-Communist witch-hunts to come,209 but the color of his politics didn't disqualify him with Orson, left-wing Democrat and premature anti-fascist that he was. So he began practicing magic four to six hours a day with Moss.210

  Although Orson had only minor sleight-of-hand skills, he did have that very rare ability to figure out how almost any trick he saw was done. This talent requires not merely a thorough knowledge of methods but, more importantly, a deep grasp of the theory of deception. This forced Moss to a continuous search for Orson-foolers, enlisting their mutual friend Dick Himber and others to this end.211 But Orson would always detect the discrepancies in their tricks and mentally work out the most plausible method, which he would immediately and unerringly either explain or even demonstrate.