With his ever-rich flow of fresh ideas Orson was always too impatient to stick to just one project at a time. Now he was simultaneously developing three films, doing a weekly radio show, and trouping a magic act.
As his magic assistant he'd trained Dolores del Río. That summer they appeared at the California State Fair, pitched on the race track grounds in Sacramento. This performance marked Orson's debut as a part-time professional conjuror. Billed as “The Ace", he did a stage act in which, among other things, the 6-foot 2-inch 218-pound mage would put the diminutive Dolores through the mock horror of chopping off her arm.212
209 Stanley Cortez interview in Higham (1970b), 104; Leaming (1985), 227. He had married actress Louise Steward in 1937. Calling himself "Hollywood's mystery man", Moss issued a 4-page bio sketch at Paramount Pictures in March 1940. For his career with Cooper see Hector Arce, Gary Cooper: An Intimate Biography (New York: Morrow, 1979), 78, 81, 120, 128, 148, 155, 237. Malvin Wald writes (Wald letter to BW, 24 Dec 91) that he first met Moss in 1965 when Mike Todd Jr. had hired him as an adviser on the Around the World of Mike Todd TV special. Next year Moss was working for a downtown LA coffee company. David Sheiner, his actor friend since 1952, says (telephone interview of 22 Dec 91) Moss, who was then married to an Oriental, died sometime between 1972 and 1978 [actually 1975]. Park Scott, his friend and dentist, (telephone interview of 15 Feb 92) gives the Moss quote.
210 Brady (1989), 316-317. "Orson Welles Takes a Partner", New York World Telegram (29 Aug 1941).
211Himber telegram to Moss, 30 Jul 41.
212Leaming (1985), 224; Bob Brown telephone interview, 3 Feb 92. For Del Río see De Witt Bodeen, "Dolores del Rio", Films in Review, Vol.18 (May 1967), 266-283; and George Hadley-Garcia [pseudonym of Boze Hadleigh], Hispanic Hollywood: The Latins in Motion Pictures (New York: Citadel Press, 1991).
He'd decided to go semi-pro because, as he later explained, “I've never had a friend in my life who wanted to see a magic trick. ... So I do it professionally – it's the only way I get to perform."213 Now, as “The Ace", the aspiring magician had his first captive audience.
Playing on the fair ground’s vast stage to an evening audience of 15,000 seated in bleachers, Orson had chosen all the wrong tricks. One reporter wrote, “Mr. Welles' magic was probably not bad at all. But 100 yards or so is a long way to try and follow an intricate bit of sleight-of-hand." Another bluntly stated that Orson had managed to “lay an egg." Ted Annemann, astute editor-publisher of The Jinx magic magazine, concluded from the reports of eyewittness magi that:214
He loves magic and does it better than most of us because he's an actor first. We think he slipped badly on this occasion by letting his favorite hobby be the motif for his act. Those who were close enough to see his coin tricks knew he was the master of whatever he might do. The other fourteen thousand and five hundred ... saw little or nothing....
Orson wasn't discouraged by this flop. Having learned from it, he immediately toured his act with Dolores at smaller venues—local county fairs and vaudeville-movie theaters.215 It was at this time that Orson first discovered Mexico, which was becoming a holiday get-away for the more adventuresome Hollywoodites. His tour guide was, of course, Dolores Del Río. By mid1941 she'd introduced him to her country (mainly Mexico City), her culture and nightlife ("El Patio") and her many friends, including Mexico's four most famous painters, Orozco, Covarrubias, Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo.
Orson's connection with Mexican Communist muralist Diego Rivera has special political significance because it may be the best evidence that Orson's Leftist leanings hadn't tumbled him into the Stalinist camp. Rivera had been the host and protector of Stalin's arch enemy, Leon Trotsky, until a quiet afternoon in August 1940 when Stalin's GPU (KGB) mole visited Trotsky's home outside Mexico City one last time and drove an ice-axe into the old Bolshevik's brain. Rivera was anathema to the leadership of the Mexican and American Communist Parties, both of which had collaborated in this assassination.
The fact that Orson and Dolores were lovers didn’t deter him from casual sex on the side. One evening that summer he was partying on the grounds of the Florentine Gardens nitery at 5955 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood. His old buddy, Burgess “Buzz” Meredith, brought his platonic girlfriend over to meet Orson. She was the Florentine’s featured dancer, Yvonne De Carlo. During the conversation, the 19-year-old Canadian said she “clung to his every word” and he left with her phone number. A couple of weeks later he picked her up at the stage door and drove her in his black sedan back to his place. The somewhat naive Miss De Carlo managed to fend off his increasingly blatant advances until she announced she wanted to go home. “I could tell he was furious,” she recalled, “but he held his temper.” And humiliated her by calling for a taxi to take her away. “Orson wasn’t as friendly to me from then on.”216
213 Quoted from 1982 BBC interview in With Orson Welles. His restatements of this point are OW 1970 interview in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 180; and Brady (1989), 362. Joseph McBride (telephone interview, 18 Nov 94) recalls OW making this point to him on the set of The Other Side of the Wind.
214 Ted Annemann in The Jinx, No.149 (28 October 1941), 830, citing reviews in The Sacramento Bee and The Sacramento Union.
215Leaming (1985), 224.
216Yvone De Carlo with Doug Warren, Yvonne: An Autobiography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 54-55.
Dante, Thurston's main protégé, had become one of the most famous stage illusionists in Latin America and Europe until the outbreak of war in 1939 forced his return to the USA where he rebuilt his show and took it on the road next year. Orson saw Dante's big new full-evening show for the first time when it played the Biltmore Hotel's Biltmore Bowl theatre in Los Angeles in the second and third weeks of October 1941. Enchanted, he particularly admired Dante's original Lazy Magician routine where the maestro merely sits in a chair while directing female assistants in the performance of a trick. With his flowing gray hair, trim goatee, and flamboyant stage manner, Dante fit Orson's ideal image of a conjuror. After the show Orson went backstage to meet the 58-year-old master magician and his featured stage assistant, the 24-ish Australian beauty, Miss Moi-Yo Miller, for whom he developed an instant crush. He judged the Danish-American illusionist one of the “greatest" and often used him as the basis of comparison—usually unfavorably—with other illusionists.217
He saw the Dante show some eight or ten times at both the Biltmore Bowl and the cosier Troupers Theatre on Las Palmas in Hollywood. Often afterwards he'd accompany Dante and Moi-Yo to the nearby Brown Derby restaurant. There, until 3 or 4 AM, he'd chat with Dante and others like Chester Morris or Milton Berle who would join their table while the beautiful Moi-Yo became increasingly bored by all the shop talk.218
217 Hansen telephone interviews, 19 Dec 91 & 27 Jan 92. Also Arturo Montes telephone interview, 8 Feb 92. Lou Harris (letter to BW received 5 Dec 92), a Dante assistant at that time, recalls meeting OW during a backstage visit. A detailed review of the Dante show at the Biltmore at that time is in Furst (1957), [1]-[4].
218Moi-Yo Miller Montes telephone interview, 20 Feb 92.
PART IV: HOLLYWOOD LIFE AFTER KANE (1941-1947)
AMBERSONS AND THE MAGIC OF LIGHT Orson’s second production for RKO was The Magnificent Ambersons, which he shot from late October to early December 1941. The script was Orson’s rewrite of Booth Tarkington’s 1918 novel of that title. It was their nostalgic look backward to the recent past of a small-town American family swept aside by progress.
Orson often claimed his father had been a friend of Tarkington and was that writer’s model for the character of manufacturer Eugene Morgan in The Magnificent Ambersons. But Tarkington records make no mention of Richard Welles. On the contrary they prove the Morgan character had other roots. Many other of Orson's misstatements were merely repeated untruths probably passed along by his father and not his own invention, as too often assumed by other biographers including, at first, myself.
Orson had hoped to
again use Toland as cinematographer, but Toland was unavailable. So Orson chose 33-year-old Stanley Cortez, younger brother of pseudo-Latin (actually Hungarian) movie heartthrob Ricardo Cortez (born Jacob Krantz). He was a fine craftsman. Unlike Toland who had found Orson, Cortez was Orson's own find. He'd just signed on at RKO when Ambersons was being planned and Jack Moss arranged for Cortez to meet Orson and sub-contract with Mercury Productions.1 Orson, unhappy with the idea of working with the studio's regular camera staff, was searching for someone more suitable. He saw Cortez's recent camera work on tests for Selznick and at Universal in Danger on the Air (1938) and The Black Cat (1941). Although these were only B movies, Orson liked the camera work, so he had Jack Moss get Cortez. Unfortunately, although Cortez was much faster than the average cinematographer, Orson, spoiled by Toland, was too impatient with him.2
Sets are normally lit by the cinematographer’s instructions to the “gaffer” (electrician) plus his own camera work with special lenses, filters, or gauzes. Looking back in 1968 on his quarter-century career as one of Hollywood's ace cameramen, Lee Garmes concluded that "Very few directors know anything about the use of light."3 Orson was one of those exceptional directors.
Stanley Cortez recalled the many battles over proper lighting he’d had with his producers and directors because “very few of them have the faintest idea of the miracles that go on all the time in the field of optics. ... Of the directors I’ve worked with, only two have understood it [light]: Orson Welles and Charles Laughton”4 This is high praise indeed, considering that Cortez, at the time of his remark, had been the lighting cameraman on 61 movies under 42 different directors, including such otherwise knowledgeable ones as Fritz Lang, Cy Endfield, Sam Fuller, and even Burgess Meredith. Guided by his painterly eye and magician’s mind, Orson had obviously learned much about manipulating light as illusion from his stage and film work with Feder, Rosenthal, and Toland.
1 Cortez interview in Higham (1970b), 104, 106. Cortez (p.104) characterizes Moss: "He was a great magician, and helped Welles learn magic."
2Cortez interview in Higham (1970b), 104-108.
3Garmes interview in Higham (1970b), 35.
4Cortez interview in Higham (1970b), 99. My count of Cortez's directors covers the period 1936-1960. His work with Laughton was on The Night of the Hunter (1955).
In making Ambersons Orson thoroughly deployed that conjuror's mind. Professor Naremore, former magician himself, sees this in an early scene where in long shot, as we observe the house across the street from the Amberson's:5
slowly the sky darkens, a moon appears, and the house is festooned with lanterns—as if by magic, a winter day is transformed into a summer night. Moments like these are not merely functional; they also draw upon a cinema of illusionism as old as Méliès. Even if we were to disregard such obvious showpieces of movie trickery, Welles's films would still seem flamboyant, filled with magic and ‘theatrical effect.'"
Orson particularly appreciated what magicians call a “sucker effect" or “sucker gag". These jargon terms refer to the type of trick where the conjuror leads the spectators to believe they've detected his method and then works a double bluff to surprise them even more.6 It's a self-revealing hoax. He was delighted whenever he could build sucker effects into his films. A grand example appears in Ambersons. We see and hear a brother and sister in conspiratorial conversation on the ground floor of a mansion. The camera then pans slowly up into the stairwell to a balcony to discover a young male relative listening in. The effect surprises because we hadn't realized that the room had enough height to conceal an evesdropper. Now, knowing this, we hear a new voice, a woman's, exclaim “Well! I can just guess what that's about." — as the camera searches further upward to yet another unexpected balcony to disclose a second family spy.
During the filming Orson continued his magic lessons from Moss. At least once a day, he'd amuse himself and attempt to amuse his cast and crew by producing a large rabbit from a top hat that he'd shown to be empty.7 He made the Rabbit From Hat a running gag, but it was also fine practice in the subtle misdirection required for this legendary effect that, in fact, very few magicians have enough nerve to perform.
Orson was always hard on secretaries. When he moved to Hollywood, stalwart Augusta Weissberger had stayed in New York to handle Mercury affairs there. So a series of replacements were hired. Few lasted long. It was a pattern. As a much later, more fortunate, secretary recalled:8
When I first went to work for him I was quite terrified of him. He later assured me that he was just as terrified of me. In fact, he went on to tell me, he was always afraid of his secretaries, which explains why he seemed to go out of his way to bully them and keep them at bay, as it were.
While working on Ambersons he found Shifra Haran, a bright, young, tall, slim, brunette, who lived with her mother. At first she was as shocked as the others by Orson's demanding, berating ways with employees. Meddlesome Dadda couldn't stand her and brought a replacement out from Chicago. She left in tears on her first day. When Shifra soon realized that Orson was always courteous to her in private, she accepted his bullying in front of others as the public performance she assumed it was. She'd remain with him as chief secretary for the next four years before final burn-out.9
5 Naremore (1978/1989), 30.
6For magicians' sucker gags see Whaley (1989), 659.
7Brady (1989), 320; Stanley Cortez interview in Higham (1970b), 104.
8Daphne Acott interview in Noble (1956), 234.
9Haran interviews in Leaming (1985), 225.
For all his flagrant woman-chasing I can’t find even a hint that he ever suggested sexual favors from any employee or potential employee.10 In the town that had invented casting-couch sex, he rejected that practice, presumably as unethical or unprofessional or both. He had tried after many martinis at the Joseph Cottens to grope actress Anne Baxter (“Lucy" in Ambersons) while she was driving him home—he'd dismissed chauffeur Shorty early to set up this situation. She shoved him out at Sunset Boulevard, removed her mangled bra and threw it into the gutter, and gunned her car off toward home and mother. In later years he sometimes attempted to seduce some female co-stars but never ones whose careers depended on him at those moments. All refused him yet none suffered any unhappy consequences. Indeed, he rehired several for other projects. Even Miss Baxter admitted toward the end of her career: “Best director I'd ever worked with."11
THE MYSTERIOUS ORANGE TREE The Great Leon (Leon Harry Levy) had been a vaudeville headliner magician until he'd retired a decade before and moved to Hollywood where he settled down for the first time in his adult life. Now, at age 65, “Popsie" Leon again became active in magic by inventing, designing, and building apparatus. He did this in a house he shared with his son, Leon M. Leon, who'd been his stage assistant until he'd preceded his father to Hollywood and become a movie sound technician. The Great Leon's private magician customers included such celebrities as Dick Himber, Chester Morris, Paco Miller, and Orson Welles.12
By mid-1941 Orson had become a frequent visitor at the Leons' North Hollywood home. At 10718 Acama Street, it was next door to the property where Orson had recently watched the Los Magicos tent show. The three men swapped stories about magic and movies. Orson commissioned him to build a mechanical Orange Tree, which was, as Leon Junior accurately recalls, “A little one-foot high plant that would grow and grow to four-feet tall and give oranges."13 When Popsie Leon finished the apparatus he debuted it at the Los Magicos meeting of November 10th.14 (Orson was unable to attend due to prior commitments that same evening to host his weekly radio show and emcee a benefit for the losers of the Spanish Civil War.)
{SIDEBAR:} Origins of Orson’s Orange Tree The first automaton Orange Tree had been exhibited (using apples) way back in 1730 by British magician Isaac Fawkes. This circumstance suggests the apparatus was the invention of Fawkes' famous mechanician, Christopher Pinchbeck, who gave the world Pinchbeck Metal, a cheap copper-zinc alloy that presented the look-alike illusion of go
ld. In 1757 mechanician Robert Richard made an automaton orange tree with singing birds (the original model was auctioned in 1977 at Sotheby's for £90,000). This was followed, in various models that also produced oranges, by Italian magician Pinetti in 1784, the Frenchman Phillippe in 1845, and Robert-Houdin who'd begun making one in 1838 and which he first exhibited in 1845. It was revived by William “Chung Ling Soo" Robinson in 1909 and most recently by Houdini in his 1925-26 season.15
10 This point was specifically verified by Paula Millard Petchon, telephone interview, 12 Dec 1993.
11Anne Baxter, Intermission: A True Tale (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1976), 131-132.
12Caveney (1987), 111-124. Paco Miller confirms being a client of Leon but doesn't recall ever having met Orson. Miller telephone interview, 12 Jan 92.
13Leon M. Leon telephone interview, 18 Apr 91. His nephew, magician Les Arnold, points out that the photo of Welles with The Great Leon shows the latter in his last years – evidence that Orson kept up this relationship until around 1947 when he moved to Europe.
14Genii, Vol.6, No.4 (Dec 1941), 131.
15For history of the Orange Tree see Whaley (1989), 487.
Houdini's presentation, which Orson would have seen as a boy in Chicago, has been best described by Arnold Furst:16
The most topical effect was listed in the program as Radio 1925. In this illusion a large console radio was turned on and remained playing until it burst apart and an attractive young lady made her appearance. Houdini then spoke briefly with the girl and her obvious French accent was noticed by the audience. The girl stood on a pedestal and was covered by a large cone which was lowered over her body. When the cone was removed it revealed a large Orange Tree on the pedestal and nothing more. Fruit from the tree was plucked and thrown out to various members of the audience. Suddenly there was a commotion in the theater as the audience became aware of the presence of the young lady who had the French accent. She was in the midst of the audience and her discovery brought fourth an enthusiastic burst of applause. {END SIDEBAR}
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