Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1

by Barton Whaley

  An important consequence of Orson's protracted preoccupation with Brazil and its women was that he lost the magnificent Dolores del Río. Thoroughly disillusioned with both Orson and Hollywood, in August 1942 she moved back to Mexico where she instantly became one of her country's top movie stars and, by playing her age, would remain so through the next three decades.70

  Orson had left Brazil at the end of July for his return to the US, traveling through South America. His itinerary included Bolivia71 where early next month he carried out another of his impersonations, or so he would claim. By pretending to be a physician he managed to get the last seat on a plane carrying a commission of leprosy specialists to the headwaters of the Amazon where he spent three weeks among headhunters.72 Maybe, but given the rarity of leprosy experts and Orson's previously discussed tall-tale story of having been diagnosed with “silver leprosy" in the Far East in his teens, we are entitled to doubt this event. Or did it prove again Orson's knack for realizing his fantasies? (Ten years later these all too real leper colonies of the Amazonian headwaters would be studied by a young Argentine medical student named “Che" Guevara.)

  SESSIONS WITH FU-MANCHÚ On the final leg of Orson’s return to the States he stopped off in mid-August in Mexico City where he was joined by the recently repatriated Dolores del Río for what would be a final reconciliation. During their turbulent three-year liaison, she’d introduced him to her country. Now, one night during this visit, they went to the fashionable El Patio nightclub, the city's largest, to catch the act of one of the world's few truly great illusionists. David “Fu-Manchú" Bamberg was working a one-year engagement there at a profitable salary as emcee and star performer with a 20-minute magic act.

  68 Wilson telephone interview, 11 Aug 93.

  69The most detailed account of the bitter struggles within RKO in that period is Lasky (1984), 160-168.

  70Rámon (1997), I, 61.

  71In his 1956 Xmas gift book to daughter Rebecca he lists festivals he had witnessed, including one "on the alti-plano of Bolivia". Welles (1956/1996). Orson had left Brazil on July 29th.

  72OW in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 163-164. Compare Higham (1985), 203, who has OW "posing as a doctor and attending a medical convention at the headwaters of the Amazon."

  David, then 38, was the latest (and would be the last) member of the illustrious six-generation Bamberg dynasty of Dutch-Jewish magicians. He was the only son of the celebrated Theo “Okito" Bamberg and his English wife. Born in England, David had been brought at age four to New York City where he learned to magish from his father and became a naturalized American citizen. Moving to Buenos Aires the year that young Orson had met Houdini, he soon took the memorable stage name of FuManchú (as Hispanicized from his favorite Sax Rohmer thriller character) and quickly became one of the two top star stage illusionists trouping throughout Latin America and Spain. He'd been living in Mexico City on-and-off for eight years when he met Orson.

  “After the show", David recalled, Orson “invited me to his table. To my surprise he gave me a resumé of the Bamberg history and it didn't take us long to get down to card tricks, which we ended at 5 A.M. with Dolores fast asleep in her chair."73 Thus began a long, though intermittent, close friendship. Their mutual admiration was both rational and inevitable because each recognized the other to be a fine magician and neither had problems with inflated egos. Both were damn good at what they did and knew it.

  Later that year David Bamberg wrote and directed a half-hour Mexican radio series called El Museu del Crimen (The Crime Museum) starring a magician-detective.74 “In one of the first of these stories", he cheerfully admitted, “I used Orson Welles' War of the Worlds technique with a realistic broadcast of a sound engineer murdered during the programme. It was realistic enough to have doctors and nurses phone the studio. The police and an ambulance showed up and nearly wrecked the show but the resulting publicity was very gratifying."75

  (Another effort to duplicate Orson's famous hoax had less happy results when in 1949 a radio station in Ecuador dramatized an invasion of Earth. An angry mob stormed and burned the studio, killing at least 15 people.76 In 1994 the made-for-TV movie, Without Warning about three large meteors threatening to end life on Earth, used the same simulated news format with no noticeable consequences.)

  By late 1942 Orson's friend Norman Foster had moved to Mexico City (where he'd remain for the rest of the decade) to direct several films for the suddenly exploding Mexican film industry. Accompanied by his actress-wife, Sally Blane (Loretta Young's older sister), the Spanish-speaking director met Orson's friend, David Bamberg. Working closely together, David later credited Foster with having taught him most of the film-making techniques that he would soon use to write and star in six Spanish-language films made in Mexico.77 All were popular and financial successes; and all starred David as detective Fu-Manchú, the first three as a conjuror-detective.78 David also appreciated Orson's cinematic tips. Particularly useful was a kit of blocks given him by Orson who demonstrated how they could be arranged to simulate a miniature stage set that could then be used to plan camera angles and positioning (“blocking") of the actors.79

  73 Bamberg (1988), 235.

  74It is probably only coincidence but Orson might have borrowed the concept from David a decade later when in 1952 he hosted the BBC radio series, The Black Museum. The premise of both shows had the host touring a museum of crime and picking an historical object connected to each story that followed. David was a good correspondent and may well have written Orson about his radio project.

  75Bamberg (1988), 236.

  76Wood (1990), 309, citing story "Grim Fantasy in Ecuador" in the New York Herald Tribune, 15 Feb 1949.

  77Bamberg (1988), 237, 246, 249.

  78Enrique Jimenez Martinez, "Films of Fu Manchu", The Linking Ring (Sep 1977), 46-49.

  On his return to Hollywood in August Orson had himself a new business manager, Jackson Leighter, formerly with Nelson Rockefeller’s Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs office. With Dolores del Río settled (permanently) in Mexico, Orson returned to his womanizing ways. Oona O'Neill, estranged daughter of Nobel Prize playwrite Eugene O'Neill, had turned 18 that May to become America's Debutante of the Year. To pursue her ambition to become a movie actress, she moved that Fall to Hollywood. There, deluged by ardent suitors, this wild and intelligent beauty met Orson soon after his return from Latin America. On their first date he took her to a nightclub where he offered to read her palm. He would later claim that, after the usual flim-flammery, he foretold her love for an older man. In the near future, he specified, she would meet and marry, of all unlikely people, Charlie Chaplin!80 Years later when asked about Orson's mindreading, Oona said she couldn't remember that bit but wouldn't deny it and spoil such a good story.81

  In the meantime she was free for a fling. It would be her second (after 36-year-old New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno) and it would be with (or so she indicated to a later lover) Orson. If true, the affair was brief and seemingly of little moment to him. And then within weeks Oona met 53-year-old Charlie Chaplin and married him next year.82

  Chaplin was then working on the screenplay of his next movie, Monsieur Verdoux, a dark comedy. The premise — a dapper Frenchman murders a series of wives for their money until meeting his comeuppance with the last — had recently been suggested to him by Orson. If Chaplin knew of Oona's allegedly sexual affair with Orson, I wonder if jealousy might help explain why Chaplin tried (unsuccessfully) to deny any credit to Orson when Verdoux was eventually released (1947). Orson demanded and got the line, "Based on an idea by Orson Welles", restored to the opening credits — but only after the movie had been panned by the critics.83

  RITA MAID: HOW TO RECRUIT A MAGICIAN'S ASSISTANT While still in Brazil after filming It's All True back in mid-year Orson had discovered his second magic assistant by browsing through a year-old issue of LIFE magazine. There she was, provocatively posed by photographer Bob Landry, kneeling sideways on a bed, her head turned to gaze past her
left shoulder directly into the camera. It was Rita Hayworth in what had already become one of the world's two most famous pin-up portraits (the other being Betty Grable's). Rita's teasing satin-and-lace nightgown was just the kind to appeal to Orson's fetish for women in sexy lingerie that he'd acquired from Dolores del Río. He began telling associates that as soon as he got back to Hollywood he intended to meet and marry Miss Hayworth. (They'd formally met the previous year when Rita was in the cast of one of his radio plays.) And when he returned that August, persisting in retelling this fantasy, rumors soon reached her. She was not amused. Not at first.

  79 Robert Bamberg telephone interview, 30 Oct 91.

  80Tynan (1961b).

  81Jane Scovell, Oona: Living in the Shadows (New York: Warner Books, 1998),103.

  82Scovell (1998), 102, 292. Based partly on Scovill's 1993 interview with Walter Bernstein., one of Chaplin's several successors in his widow's affections.

  83OW in Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 135-137; OW 1983 interviews in Leaming (1985), 219-220..

  “I am like Casanova," Orson explained. “Not as a sexual acrobat—because I'm not. But because I am willing to wait under the window until four-thirty in the morning. I'm that kind of romantic fellow, you see. I go the distance in the chase. It took me five weeks to get Rita to answer the phone, but once she did we were out that night."84

  At dinner, to overcome her innate shyness and get her to reveal herself, Orson tried one of his old magician-mindreaders' tricks. It had worked for him before with ballerinas and showgirls and Oona O'Neill. He pretended to read Rita's thoughts. If he sensed right he was mistaken for a real mindreader and she would elaborate. If he guessed wrong she'd correct him. By this simple device, Orson gradually got her to open up—evidently more so than she'd ever done with anyone.85

  Orson had stolen Rita away from Victor Mature who, although the first actor of stage or film to be labeled a “hunk", was both intelligent and witty. When Mature found out, and learned (falsely) that Orson was rehearsing Rita in the Sawing, he joked to reporters that this was “a hell of a way to woo a girl", explaining on another occasion that “I guess the quickest way to a girl's heart is to cut her in half."86

  If Mature was philosophical, Orson’s pal Marlene Dietrich was shocked. She confided to her teenage daughter, Maria, who’d worked on Orson’s radio show: “An intelligent man like that? Fall for a Mexican hoofer? ... Does he maybe like hair under arms?” And then, as she would his later misconceived affairs, forgave and excused him: “Orson needs it. Don’t ask me why. He just needs to love somebody all the time—poor man!”87

  * * * During Orson's many trips back to New York City since late 1939 he'd begun frequenting The Conjurer's Shop in its original basement location on West 56th Street and befriended the courtly owner, London-born ex-theatrical director Stuart Robson. Orson would drop in occasionally to see the proprietor and the two would disappear into Robson's back room living quarters for private talks, presumably about magic and theater.88

  One evening, probably in late 1942, after Robson had moved his shop to an upper floor of the Bush Tower Building at 130 West 42nd Street just off Times Square, Orson stopped in around closing time. While Robson's assistant Norm Jensen watched, Orson asked for—of all improbable things—an Imp Bottle and proceeded to demonstrate his new routine for Robson. The venerable Imp Bottle is a tiny round-bottomed flask that can be laid on its side by the magician but always bobs upright when a volunteer tries. A popular magic and joke shop item for the previous seven decades, its secret, which involved a simple gimmick and a primitive sleight-of-hand move, was widely known.89 Nevertheless Jensen recalls, “I was honestly spellbound watching him do this lousy little trick." Orson had succeeded in taking a tired effect and making it “a new trick" by his fresh patter-routine and hypnotic acting.90

  Robson had been planning for a couple of years to produce a big public one-night magic show in New York and Orson agreed to become one of the two headliners, the other being Abe Cantu with his innovative magic act with doves. By the time Robson's Magic on Broadway could be firmly scheduled (for 8 May 1943), both stars had dropped out, Orson because he'd already committed to an ambitious magic project of his own in Hollywood. When Robson's show finally opened, its sole headliner was John Mulholland; and only an up-coming 26-year-old comedy magician named Carl Ballantine made any real hit with the audience.91

  84 Leaming (1989), 80-81, quoting her interview with Welles.

  85OW interview with Leaming (1989), 81.

  86San Francisco News, 8 Aug 1943; Leaming (1985), 268; and Ward (1983), 34.

  87Riva (1993), 529.

  88Jay Marshall letter to BW, 29 Feb 92.

  89For the history of the Imp Bottle see Whaley (1989), 353.

  90Jensen telephone interviews, 21 and 23 Aug 91. Jensen doesn't recall the specifics of Orson's presentation. Robson had reopened his shop in the Bush Tower Building on 1 Apr 1941 after about a year in his original location.

  At the beginning of September 1942 Orson was in New York City on war benefit business. On the 4th, a Friday evening, the local magi gave him a testimonial dinner. As a souvenir of the occasion, Orson autographed a large handkerchief that had been signed by his 25 celebrants. Labled “Gathering in Honor of the Great Welles from Mars”, its centerpiece was a charicature of Orson drawn by amateur magician Abril Lamarque with less than his usual skill. Still Orson was gracious enough to inscribe it "With standing [?] thanks from the original—Orson Welles".92

  It was at this dinner that Orson first met Bruce Elliott, Walter Gibson's co-editor on their new Phoenix magic magazine, and showed Bruce “a beautiful trick" that he'd recently learned in Mexico from Dave Bamberg. Bruce "liked it so much that Welles is moving heaven and earth (well, practically) to get a release from Bamberg on the trick."93 As it never appeared in The Phoenix, Orson's follow-up efforts with David, if any, were unsuccessful. But Orson and Bruce would become close friends.

  The NBC Blue Network was holding up its part of the billion dollar War Bond drive. Orson helped out on the 11th by narrating a patriotic broadcast special titled Men, Machines and Victory. During long breaks in the six-hour rehearsal he gave an interview to PM newspaper, signed some autographs, and did card tricks for Pulitzer Prize-winning poet-historian Carl Sandburg and the PM photog whom he got to pose with him while the reporter photographed the photographer. Avoiding the jaded “Take a card" patter, Orson opened his card effects with unexpected lines like “Give me the name of a girl you're trying to forget." Sandburg, 67, dodged that one.94

  While still in New York at the end of the month he went to the main NBC radio studio to rehearse an historical drama for the DuPont-sponsored Cavalcade of America series. The 30-minute playlet was by a little-known 27-year-old radio writer named Arthur Miller who arrived with the draft script in time to catch Orson in mid-tirade. With mighty roars and broad gestures, the star was refusing to act in this drama about Mexican peasant revolutionary hero Benito Juárez. He was protesting the version wanted by a Yale history professor NBC had called in to vet the script. “It is," Orson announced, “a TRAVESTY, I tell you, a LIE, a purposeful and contemptible distortion of KNOWN FACTS in order to justify the unforgivable!" Orson proclaimed his authority in this matter “because an ancestor, Gideon Welles, was the navy secretary involved in the very incident that had been dramatized as a great American success in Latin America when in reality it had been a catastrophe and a disgrace." Miller, realizing that his script would at least match Orson's political view, had it passed across to Orson. Apparently surprised that it opened with a verse narration, Orson began reading to himself, fitting the words to his lips. He then stepped to the microphone and read the first page aloud—he had become Juárez. The other players closed around him and the rehearsal began. Miller had given him what he wanted all along, and Orson, after rehearsal, repaid the timely stranger with a warm embrace.95 Quick to recognize talent, Orson promptly hired the future Pulitzer Prize winner to write for one of his two new radi
o series.96

  91 Jean Hugard letter to Fred Braue, 8 May 1943; Bruce Elliott in The Phoenix, No.35 (14 May 1943), 146.

  92I can decipher the signatures of Roy Benson, Ken Crossen, Ben Dalgin, Bruce Elliott, Joe Hallock (?), George Karger, Charles Larson, John McArdle, Eddie McCullough, Jay Marshall, Carl Olson (?), Stuart Robson, John Scarne, Solomon Stein, Dai Vernon, and Orson Welles. This handkerchief was later given by Abril Lamarque to Eric Stanley Palm who then gave it to Doug Edwards. The item repeatedly but unsuccessfully auctioned at a reserve of $250 on eBay from late October 2000 through May 2001 by magicmadness@aol.com . E. S. Palm telephone interview with BW, 8 May 2001.

  93Elliott in The Phoenix, No.18 (12 Sep 1942), 78.

  94Norris (1942), 17. The program aired 28 Sep 1942. Details in Wood (1990), 120-121.

  Had Arthur Miller witnessed a tantrum or a theatrical performance? Aside from Orson's ability to suddenly shift moods, the best evidence that it was make-believe was his strategically placed lie—Gideon Welles, Lincoln's famous Secretary of the Navy, was no ancestor. This pretence was part of Orson's repertoire of useful fibs. Orson had taken Gideon's name in vanity as early as age 10 when he'd smuggled this tall-tale into that interview with him published in a mid-Western newspaper.97 Later, in the 1960s, he would resurrect it to beguile British film critic Kenneth Tynan.98

  Orson chose September 25th to mount what has been called radio’s “best-known practical joke.” The occasion was his first and last appearance on The Philip Morris Playhouse. That week’s CBS halfhour drama show’s play, “Crime Without Passion”, was based on a Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur short story and 1934 movie. Orson was the Narrator. As he was the only one working his unfolding joke, the entire regular cast and production staff was its target, although an obvious point of focus had no doubt been the show’s notoriously dictatorial director, Charles Martin. Actor Joe Julian describes the scene:99