Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1
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Orson also found Blackstone's “gin-red nose" offensive and felt his assistants were underrehearsed.42 His comment about under-rehearsed assistants was true of the Blackstone show only during the period 1942-46 when the American military had taken most of the young men from the theater and vaudeville stage. The other years Blackstone carried a permanent full-time and well-trained crew. Evidently Orson had never seen the show under peacetime conditions. Incidentally, Orson had drawn a false inference from Blackstone's nose—red indeed, but from “catarrh", a chronic inflammation of the nasal membranes. Unlike Dante, who was sometimes visibly drunk on stage, Blackstone was a teetotaler.43
That January Orson was eagerly anticipating his trip across the equator to Rio de Janeiro to film its famous annual Carnaval Enamored by the idea of Rio, he fabricated the biographical myth that he'd been conceived there during a parental holiday. In fact his mother was already pregnant when she and husband Richard set out from Wisconsin to begin the 14-day cruise-ship vacation that took them no closer to Rio than the Caribbean. But this fancy persists. 44 Such conception and birthplace mythmaking was, as Orson would know, as traditional among magicians as it was with Hollywood stars. Two examples: Harry Houdini and William “Chung Ling Soo" Robinson. Houdini, knowing otherwise, usually pretended that he was American-born and disclosed to very few that he'd been born in Hungary. More amusing is the case of Robinson, a native New Yorker who had the chummy habit of telling acquaintances and journalists that he'd been born in their birthplace, whether this was Philadelphia, Yorkshire, or Aberdeen.
39 Endfield audiotape (Fall 1992); Endfield letters to BW, 11 May & 10 Aug 92; Endfield in Rosenbaum (1993), 50-51. Bill Woodfield reports that Endfield told him that Orson was responsible for getting him into the business.
40Louis R. "Lou" Harris letter to BW, received 5 Dec 92. Harris was a Blackstone assistant intermittently from 1939 until around 1952.
41Gary Darwin interview, 11 May 91.
42Geoffrey Hansen telephone interview, 30 Apr 92.
43George Johnstone letters to BW, 27 Sep & 3 Oct 92; Bill Chaudet telephone interview, 24 Oct 92.
44This myth was first published two years earlier by Johnston & Smith (1940), I-11, who have an already pregnant Mrs. Welles visiting Rio with her husband, George Ade, and Orson C. Wells. Naremore (1978), 8, properly skeptical, points out that OW, tailoring his stories to suit his audiences, told different interviewers that either Rio or Paris was his place of conception. The Rio myth was first fully exposed by Higham (1985), 191. However it was accepted by Leaming (1985), 8; Brady (1989), 1, 335; and Bogdanovich in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 65.
On February 5th Orson flew off to Brazil where, in Rio, he again mixed a tough filming schedule with frequent times off for general carousing, including at least one public performance of his magic act.45 When he met President Vargas’ wife, Medare, he volunteered his services as a magical entertainer—“magic speaks a universal language, it may prove useful for benefits and the like.”46
Although too busy when out on location to do any magic for his small traveling crew,47 Orson later said that card tricks helped ease his way socially among Latin Americans he met and one press release mentions him showing magic to fishermen extras.48 In Rio he thought up an original card trick that required 52 decks of playing cards (presumably to create one trick deck by cannibalizing the others). As a local shop didn't have that many matched decks, he would have to wait until returning to the USA to test the trick.49
Oscar night in Hollywood on February 26th was broadcast live by radio. Although Citizen Kane had been nominated in nine of the Academy’s 13 relevant categories, Hollywood’s continuing resentment of the Boy Wonder, saw it win in only one—Original Screenplay. It was awarded jointly to Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles. Radio brought the news to Orson in Rio and to Mankiewicz in his Beverly Hills bedroom. Both were disappointed, Orson because his movie hadn’t garnered more Oscars, Mank because he’d had to share credit with Orson. Orson’s belated (by 38 days) but genial congratulatory letter to Mank began “You can kiss my half.” And, continuing the pun, closed with his own suggested version of a suitable rejoinder: “Dear Orson: You don’t know your half from a whole in the ground.” But the unforgiving Mank preferred to nurse his bitterness by drafting a mock acceptance speech that went: “I am very happy to accept this award in Mr. Welles’s absence because the script was written in Mr. Welles’s absence.” Clever but false.
Orson perceived that Brazilian women “have all the balls. They decide who they go to bed with. They tell you."50 As a randy 27 year-old, he found this attitude disconcerting but irresistibly erotic. Shifra Haran, his eye-witness secretary, confirmed and enlarged on his claim: “He had not just one-night stands but afternoon stands, before-dinner stands, and after-dinner stands. Quickies by the thousands!"51 Tom Pettey, RKO's publicity flack in Rio, complained to the home office that Orson would often just “pick up a girl and vanish in his car for hours."52 Cameraman John Biroc, while aware of the truth behind such slams at Orson, found them selectively self-serving coming from individuals within a group of horny RKO Yankee visitors “ninety percent" of whom were similarly opening themselves to sexual “blackmail".53
Orson's extended his unexpected fascination with the women of Brazil to that country's people in general and its music in particular. The Brazilian samba vibrated for him much the way that American jazz had. Consequently he added “The Story of Samba” as a major segment in his planned docudrama.
45 Higham (1970), 87.
46Thomson (1996), 213.
47George Fanto telephone interview, 1 May 92, confirmed by Betty (Amster) Wilson telephone interview, 5 Aug 93.
48Higham (1985), 198.
49Norris (1942), 16, 17.
50OW interview of 9 May 84 in Leaming (1985), 247.
51Haran film interview in It's All True (1993) documentary as quoted in Kenneth Turan, "The Lost Piece to the Welles Puzzle", Los Angeles Times, 24 Oct 1993, Calendar section p.4.
52Higham (1985), 200.
53Biroc interview in Tales from Hollywood #5 (1987).
This was a fateful decision because such a high proportion of Brazil’s people and musicians were not merely living in or near poverty but were mostly of Black African descent. RKO's assigned project honcho was Lynn Shores. One might have thought he would have felt an affinity for Orson, having directed one of the old Shadow movies. But it seems he merely resented being passed over by a younger, truly talented person, In any case, knowing Hollywood's general bias against blacks, Shores was quick to inform his bosses back home that Orson was featuring “niggers" in their film.54 Admirable bureaucratic loyalty? Not quite. Shores also tattled to the Brazilian government’s Department of Press and Propaganda about the film's extensive focus on “the negro and the low class element in and around Rio ... which I feel are all in bad taste."55 Like white Hollywood, the white Brazilian elite believed that black should remain invisible. Thus Shores’ intervention helped turn the local government against not just Orson but RKO’s entire project as well. Cinematographer Fanto warned Dick Wilson that while Orson was away a few days, “the Shores gang prepared a last dirty trick.” Crew member Santos had slipped and fallen with the main camera that he was trying to rescue from a sudden rain squall — a true accident as agreed by “many witnesses.” The damage to the camera was “insignificant” but Shores began hinting that “Orson gave orders to break it.”56 By such charges and innuendos the “Shores gang” achieved enough sabotage that Orson and RKO and their film lost all support. It is just one of those coincidences common to all close-knit communities like Hollywood that Shores, a former director, had previously directed the first Shadow movie, The Shadow Strikes (1937).
If Shores was an outright saboteur as well as spy, the studios’s other spy wasn’t much better. Tom Pettey was RKO’s publicity man with the crew. He too was enraged by Orson’s focus on Brazil’s poor blacks and popular music, writing home that:57
We are shooting the s
ame stuff – carnival – recording the same songs – carnival sambas – and a large percentage of it as black as a storm cloud. We have a closed set, a studio full of jigaboos and a little set depicting a hut in the hills.... God, if I see another torso shot of a nigger wench waving her hips I’m going to shoot that French still man
Well, “that French still man” was 35-year-old Ned Scott who was already a famous landscape and Hollywood still photographers, having worked freelance for such leading directors as John Huston and now Orson Welles.
By leaving for Brazil while both Ambersons and Journey were unfinished Orson had unwittingly begun his own journey into fear and loathing. Back in Hollywood all his projects were coming apart. Jack Moss and Jo Cotten had stayed behind to handle the post-production work on The Magnificent Ambersons, which Orson assumed he would personally edit in Brazil. And Norman Foster was left to complete most of the filming on Journey into Fear. RKO's censorious front office had already forced enough changes in dialogue and characterization to turn both Ambler's and Welles' original wondrously intelligent and dark political drama into just another trivial thriller. Now, with Orson conveniently out of the way, RKO took over the cutting on both pictures as well.
RKO Radio Pictures chief George Schaefer remembered those Orsonian softball games and magic tricks played on himself and the studio's Eastern investors when they'd visit the Citizen Kane set. Orson presumed that these bits of buffoonery were just fun-and-games diversions and always believed that Schaefer took them as a “practical joke" in the “friendly" spirit intended.58 Wrong. According to the studio bosses's main flunky, Orson's “monkey business" with softball and magic “didn't sit well with Schaefer."59 Not at all well. Orson, of all people, should have realized that his effort to play Falstaff to Schaefer's Prince Hal was doomed.
54 Shores letter in Tales from Hollywood #5 (1987).
55Shores letter of 11 Apr 1942 as quoted in Wood (1990), 184.
56Fanto letter to Wilson, 29 Jul 1942 as quoted in
57Pettey letter to Herb Drake, 7 Apr 1942, as quoted in Denning (1996), 397.
German émigré social scientists Horkheimer and Adorno pointed out at the time that the Hollywood moguls were so powerful that it pleased them to be seen to permit a certain degree of rebelliousness. They wrote:60
Whenever Orson Welles offends against the tricks of the trade, he is forgiven because his departures from the norm are regarded as calculated mutations which serve all the more strongly to confirm the validity of the system.
But Orson, as he'd done five years earlier in defying the WPA Federal Theatre Project bureaucrats, finally pushed the Hollywood moguls beyond their tight limits of political, artistic, and humane tolerance. The ultimate game in any enterprise such as Hollywood isn't profits, much less product quality, but always King of the Hill—who rules and is seen to rule. Thus Orson's jests were deeply, if quietly, resented as both the insult and the challenge to authority that they were. A prime directive of this power game is that Hill Kings must never admit they feel threatened by rebellious underlings lest they seem weak and thereby become weak. Instead they must find plausible excuses for destroying their challengers. Publicly acceptable reasons for firing Orson would have to be economic or professional: running over budget and schedule or showing irresponsibility toward the studio. The two RKO underlings, Shores and Pettey, who accompanied Orson to Brazil exaggerated both charges61 and their RKO bosses spread them by rumor and in the press. On June 1st Mercury’s publicity man wired Orson to warn that:62
There is a widespread nurtured campaign to prove you have been spending too much time and wasting too much money in Brazil; that “Ambersons” is no good, and “Fear” ditto. This has gone so far as a personal visit from {RKO’s] Koerner to the Hollywood Reporter. As I wrote [Richard] Wilson, Billy Wilkerson [Editor of The Hollywood Reporter] informed his staff that he was quoting Schaefer when he said “Koerner told Wilkerson that RKO would on no condition ever allow you to work in the studio again.”
Although more false than true, these claims would greatly and forever damage Orson's reputation. (This disastrous scenario would be replayed in Hollywood 14 years later when Orson worked briefly for Desilu Productions.)
In all the charges and counter-charges about Orson's overruns on costs and schedules, a key piece of evidence is overlooked by not comparing his track record with the other major producers and directors of the time. Thus we are always reminded that Kane cost $840,000 and lost $150,000 in first run. But no one counters by pointing out that MGM's The Wizard of Oz (1939) cost $2,777,000 and lost a cool million in its first release without anyone publicly chiding producer Mervyn LeRoy. Of course, after 20 years its re-releases began earning plenty—just like Kane and Ambersons. Similarly RKO's Gunga Din (1939) cost $1,915,000 (the studio's most expensive movie until then) and earned no profit but no heads fell. Nor did heads roll when of RKO's 38 in-house features the previous year (1940) at least five suffered bigger net losses than Kane: Swiss Family Robinson ($180,000), Little Men ($214,000), They Knew What They Wanted ($291,000), Dance, Girl, Dance ($400,000), and Abe Lincoln in Illinois ($745,000). Measured against these big losers even Ambersons' huge loss of $624,000 wasn't unprecedented.
58 OW in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 79.
59Reginald Armour (assistant to Schaeffer) interview in Tales from Hollywood #5 (1987).
60Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 129.
61Brady (1989), 337, summarizes the calumnies of RKO man Lynn Shores. The other man knocking Orson on the trip was, as we've seen, Tom Pettey.
62Drake to OW, 1 Jun 1942, as quoted in
And these were just the bigger blips in RKO Radio Picture's overall economic earthquake. The studio's bottom line had been writ in red ink every month since August 1941.63 So, if Orson's losses weren't particularly outrageous, how did his cost over-runs compare? Warner's Casablanca (1942) went 9% over budget, M-G-M's The Wizard of Oz (1939) ran 10% over, Universal's Eagle Squadron (1942) overran 20%, and William Wyler's Jezebel (1938) for Warner's a whopping 37%. Thus neither Kane at 12% nor even Ambersons at 19% were as outrageously wasteful as portrayed by Orson's detractors. The rare trick in Hollywood—then and now—was exemplified at Warner's by director John Huston who completed The Maltese Falcon (1941) for a paltry $327,000, which was 12% below budget and earned big on first run.
Orson had been behaving irresponsibly—not toward RKO but toward his Mercury employees and the integrity of his three unfinished films. He should have known. But did he? Dadda Bernstein, who'd moved to Beverly Hills where he set up in general practice, had written Orson in Brazil to warn about the “mercenary people who surround you -— Moss, his lawyer, and others who have sucked you dry!” and weren’t properly protecting Orson's interests at RKO.64 Although rather off-target, Dadda was now misread by Orson as The Man Who Cried Wolf. Cotten, as naive as the character he'd just played in Journey and would repeat in The Third Man, thinking he was saving Orson from a disaster, helped RKO compromise the heart out of Ambersons. Moss surely knew better; but, as Mercury Productions business manager, he was at the core of this debacle. While the crisis deepened Cy Endfield often watched Moss (who’d moved into his boss's vacant office) open Orson's urgent telegrams and letters of instruction and, after a glance, toss many directly into the waste basket. He also let Orson's direct telephone ring unanswered. Although Moss was on Orson's Mercury payroll, Endfield concluded that he'd become an RKO stooge.65 And Orson's personal secretary, Augusta Weissberger, who was off in Brazil with her boss during this period, decided that Moss had gradually come “to protect his interests against Orson." She even said that Moss had sent Richard Wilson with the advance party to Brazil as Moss's agent,66 implying that Moss had already begun to work against Orson way back in January.
These charges against Moss by Bernstein, Endfield, and Weissberger are almost cert
ainly an innocent but gross misreading of the clues. Robert Wise, whose working relationship with Moss overlapped and was closer than either Endfield's or Weissberger's during this crucial period, speculates:67 It might have been, as months went on, that Jack threw away repetitious and pointless cables from Orson. But Jack Moss was not a studio stooge and should never be pictured as “disloyal" to Welles.
63Jewell (1982), 116, 126, 140-142, 156, 168.
64Bernstein letter of 14 May 42 as excerpted in Lawrence French’s
65Endfield audiotape, Fall 1992; Endfield in Rosenbaum (1993), 52.
66Weissberger interview in Noble (1956), 187.
67Wise letter to BW, 12 Jul 93.
Wise, as an RKO employee at that time, understandably tends to interpret this event from the studio viewpoint. But Betty Wilson, speaking from a life-long Mercury perspective and close personal association with both Moss and Welles, confirms Wise on this point, vigorously proclaiming Moss's continuous loyalty to Orson.68
The power struggle ended on July 1st when RKO dispatched studio manager Sid Rogell to abruptly and rudely evict Mercury Productions from the studio lot. Had Orson rushed back earlier to defend his own and Mercury’s interests, matters might have worked out better. But he later repeatedly claimed he felt committed to his Good Neighbor film in Latin America for Roosevelt's State Department and Nelson Rockefeller in the latter's governmental capacity as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.69
(When released next early next year in its miserable studio cut, Journey into Fear received the public and critical attention it deserved—very little. Orson accepted the responsibility, overlooked the inability of Moss, Cotten, and Foster to cajole more cooperation from RKO, and remained their friend.)