Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1

by Barton Whaley

  These orders prove that Orson's taste in magic books was impeccable: the latest works of Annemann, Clark, Curry, Farelli, Gunther & Fleischman, Maly, Mulholland, Ovette, Stebbins, and Walsh, plus anything on hypnotism. Nor did he make the mistake of too many magicians (then and now) of assuming that just because a book wasn't wet from the press it was passé. As he told his fellow magic historian friend Milbourne Christopher who agreed, he deplored the fact that so many of the better tricks were no longer being performed.313 Knowing that overlooked or forgotten secrets lay scattered in many older works, he ordered the complete bound back issues (except for the two most recent years, which he presumably already had) of two leading magazines: The Sphinx (since 1902) and Tablets of Osiris (since 1929). These two fine periodicals also helped fill his hunger for information on magic history.

  His avid pursuit of books that exposed the tricks of fake psychics and con artists led him to such classics as Houdini's The Right Way to Do Wrong: An Exposé of Successful Criminals (1906), Miracle Mongers and Their Methods (1920), and A Magician Among the Spirits (1924), as well as Harry Price's Revelations of a Spirit Medium (1922), and Frank King's Cagliostro (1929). For all these older books and magazines he relied mainly on mail orders from the world's leading second-hand magic book dealer, Leo Rullman in New York City.

  * * * Orson's growing public reputation as a magician continued to make him the butt of handy literary allusions. For example, on May 18th, writer Donald Ogden Stewart wired him to complain about Orson's having been abrupt in tentatively cancelling his plans to direct one of Stewart's stage plays by stating, “One doesn't saw a writer in two so conveniently—I think you owe me something more than a telegram." Stewart's attempt at humor failed to disguise his whining need to be liked, an often self-defeating habit that when it cost him friends, turned him nastily and accusingly against them. In this case, he would falsely accuse Orson of having dropped him because of his, Stewart's, pro-Soviet views.314

  But Orson had more important things on his mind that day, May 18th. Specifically, he was acting in the first of a two-part episode for CBS that would be broadcast that evening and the following week. The show was the enormously popular, Suspense, directed by William Spier who had justly earned his accolade as “the Hitchcock of the air.” Orson, who’d guested on five Suspense episodes in previous years, would appear in five more during this stay in New York in April and May.315

  Adapted from Curt Siodmak’s sci-fi novel, Orson played the mad scientist who must keep Mr. Donovan’s severed brain alive in a large glass bottle. Sound-effects engineer Berne Surrey spent three weeks to devise the creepy sounds of a brain’s range of emotions by modulating the noise of a submerged motor pump and a gurgling oscillator in a jar of water. This broadcast would become a classic of radio science fiction and when released on phonograph records in 1982 win a Grammy for “Best Spoken Word”.

  Orson's finances were shakier than usual throughout that year of 1944. He got no new movie work, so the bulk of his income continued to come from radio. But his total earnings of $80,000 didn't even cover expenses much less his $65,000 in debts. Rita helped with a $30,000 interest-free loan. In mid-year, in anticipation of their baby's birth, she rented an imposing 10-room house with large grounds and pool at 136 South Carmelina Drive in fashionable Brentwood for an appropriately imposing $1,500 per month. Orson decorated it with Thurston and bullfight posters and a real-life bullfighter as houseguest.316

  313 Christopher in The Conjurors' Magazine, Vol.2, No.9 (Nov 1946), 28, reporting their conversation following OW's matinee performance of Around the World that summer.

  314Stewart telegram to OW, 18 May 1944; Donald Ogden Stewart, By A Stroke of Luck (London: Paddington Press Ltd, 1975), 270-274. Higham (1985), 214, also quotes from this telegram but manages to garble all the circumstances — Stewart wasn't working on a radio show with Orson and wasn't complaining about "radical editing". The item at issue was the manuscript of Stewart's play, Emily Brady, and not some radio or film script. Orson hadn't edited it in any case, and he did reply (by telephone).

  315Welles & Bogdanovich (1992), 383; 449; Museum of Broadcasting (1988), 69; Nachman (1998), 315-316..

  In addition to his work at the national level politicking for Roosevelt and the UN and soliciting donations for the 5th War Loan Drive, Orson became marginally involved in Hollywood's local Left-wing politics. Thus in June 1944 he (and Rita) sent messages of support for the founding meeting of the Emergency Committee of Hollywood Guilds and Unions.317

  Orson was also on the board of the Hollywood Democratic Committee (HDC), which had been formed in Jan 1943. Chaired by Communist George Pepper, after FDR’s reelection it merged in 1946 with the national organization and renamed itself the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (HICCASP). And, finally, he became a founding sponsor of the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions. The ICC/ASP had been formed in New York by sculptor Jo Davidson (it’s his bust of FDR that’s on the American dimes). Set up as the main political action committee to support Roosevelt’s reelection that upcoming November, the boards of directors included a mixed bag of liberals (like Ronald Reagan in the Hollywood branch), Communists (like Dalton Trumbo), and even Republicans for FDR.318

  After Roosevelt’s sudden death and the first icy winds of the Cold War in 1945, after Orson had ceased being active and Reagan had resigned in disgust, that the ICC/ASP board was captured by the Communists and morphed in late 1946 into the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA) to support Henry Wallace’s campaign for the presidency.

  A curious story appeared in Hedda Hopper's gossip column. When she became aware that Orson had seemingly dropped out of sight for several days, she wondered if this signaled a marital breakup between Beauty and the Brain. It didn't. But Orson did have a secret. Having squeezed it from an indiscreet Rita on August 27th, Hopper reported to her readers next morning that Orson was away for a week doing some unspecified “special work" for President Franklin D. Roosevelt.319 (Orson later explained that, when during a meeting with FDR the President had asked him to undertake a secret assignment to be known only to the two of them, Orson had asked FDR to telephone the ever-jealous Rita to explain his absence. To Rita's amazement the President did so.320)

  This Hopper column piece caught the eye of the FBI's Los Angeles Field Division, which sent a special agent to "make casual inquiry" of her. “She stated she did not know exactly what the President was having WELLES do but she did know that he was on some kind of mission for the President." The mighty FBI was unable to ferret out what Orson's assignment for FDR was but assumed it had to do with the current presidential election campaign.321

  316 Stackpole (1992), 130-132.

  317Nancy Lynn Schwartz, The Hollywood Writers' Wars (New York: Knopf, 1982),, 211.

  318Ceplair & Englund (1980), 229239; Schwartz (1982), 213.

  319Los Angeles Examiner, 28 Aug 1944.

  320Brady (1989), 374. According to the FDR Library in Hyde Park the White House did not keep telephone logs during Roosevelt's presidency. Consequently neither the date nor even the fact of this call can be verified.

  321SAC, Los Angeles, to Director, FBI, Office Memorandum, 3 Nov 1944. Repeated in an interoffice memo by J.C. Strickland to D.M. Ladd [head of the Domestic Intelligence Division], 22 Nov 1944.

  The Bureau had been tracking Orson's left-wing connections with mild concern since early 1941, particularly over his involvement with Communist Richard Wright’s play Native Son.322 FBI oversight was further stimulated after 1943 when Orson’s dealings with Louis Dolivet had begun. Then in 1945, the year after the FDR-Welles flap, Director J. Edgar Hoover would personally order that Orson be upgraded to a “Communist" who “can be considered a threat to the internal security of this country." Orson's 194-page FBI dossier (updated through 1956) wasn't deactivated until 1976 when he was cleared after a routine security check requested by the Gerald Ford White House.323

  Orson n
ever learned about any of this FBI surveillance. A pity, for he would surely have been amused. However his political naivete was such that he would probably have been more puzzled than amused to learn he was simultaneously being closely watched by Soviet Intelligence, a fact whose odd details are only now becoming clear. When did Moscow begin to take notice of Orson?

  His first collaborations with individual Communist Party members had begun back in 1936 while working in Manhattan on the Federal Theatre Project. These domestic CPUSA contacts would not of themselves be sufficient to trigger interest in Moscow. This would require that Orson's network of friends and associates come to include persons working directly with one or more of the three main Soviet intelligence organizations, the State Security Service (various known as the NKVD, KGB, etc.), Military Intelligence (the GRU), or, prior to WW II, the Comintern's INO.

  In the event, the first indication of a sinister effort to manipulate Orson did not take place until eleven months after the USA and the USSR became wartime allies against Nazi Germany. At that time (November 1942) Otto Katz wrote a letter from Mexico to Hy Craft, his Hollywood protégé. Katz's letter mentioned his glowing biography of Stalin and stated his hope that Orson Welles could be persuaded to star in the planned movie version. It seems Katz expected to influence Orson through Orson's trusted friend and Katz's long-time lover and collaborator—Marlene Dietrich, no less. (We know of Katz's letter only because it had been intercepted by the FBI, which made it part of their growing dossier on Dietrich.)324

  Katz was part of a tangled web of overlapping networks of personal friends, professional associates, unwitting dupes, and fully witting agents of and professional officers of the secret Soviet services. It is a crude error to presume guilt by mere association, particularly when that association may be through intermediaries. But there is no doubt about Katz. He'd joined the German Communist Party (KPD) in 1922 and was recruited as a protégé of Soviet agent Willi Münzenberg who sent him in 1933 to Moscow. There Katz became established as a full-fledged agent of the Soviet State Security apparatus (NKVD, later KGB) before returning to France.325 After working under Münzenberg in Paris, Katz arrived in the USA in 1935, trumpeted as a refugee from Hitler's Germany. That claim was no more true than the name he then pretended to, "Rudolph Breda". Nor was he a refugee — his destination had been dictated by his secret Soviet masters, as was that of his traveling companions, the aristocratic Prince Lowenstein, playwright Bertolt Brecht, composer Hanns Eisler, and political satirist Egon Erwin Kisch. They'd been assigned to stir up anti-Hitler sentiments in the politically naive USA and recruit suitable "agents of influence".

  322 Wiener (1996), 20.

  323Naremore (1991). See also Wiener (1996), 20, who points out that 5 pages remain classified.

  324McLellan (2000), 303.

  325The following books are particularly relevant: Patrick Marnham, The Death of Jean Moulin (London: Murray, 2000), for "Cot", "Dolivet", "Robinson", "Labarthe",and "Münzenberg"; Stephen Koch, Double Lives (New York: Free Press, 1994), for Katz , Dolivet, & Münsterberg; John Costello, Mask of Treachery (New York: Morrow, 1988), for "Münzenberg", "Katz", "Dolivet"; Hy Kraft, On My Way to the Theater (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 145-149 for "Katz/Breda; Donald Ogden Stewart, By a Stroke of Luck! (London: Paddington, 1975), 225-226; Stuart Y. Silverstein, Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker (New York: Scribner, 1996), 45-48, for "Katz"; Babette Gross, Willi Münzenberg: A Political Biography (Michigan State University Press, 1974) for Münsterberg and Katz; Gerald Howson, Arms for Spain (New York: St. Martin's, 1998), for Cot..

  That spring Katz, still posing as "Breda", descended upon Hollywood where he founded the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. The occasion was a $100-a-plate white-tie celebrity dinner hosted by comedy writers Dorothy Parker and Donald Odgen Stewart, two of Orson's professional and social acquaintances who were even more politically naive than he — perfect targets for puppet-master Katz.

  Katz had returned to the USA briefly in 1939 (on a Czech passport and for a French left-wing newspaper) and again in 1940 on a temporary visitor's visa. When his request for permanent residence was turned down (on suspicion of being an NKVD agent) he moved in late 1940 to Mexico where he spent the rest of the war.

  * * * Orson was politicking back in New York in early September (1944) when pregnant Rita joined him at the Straight-Dolivet estate on Long Island. Although he'd again begun directing his libido toward other women, he managed to dodge a potential affair with ardent Gloria Vanderbilt, the famously beautiful but emotionally pathetic young heiress whom he'd met one evening at the “21" club with her wife-battering first husband.326

  Around Thanksgiving Orson was back on the West Coast, appearing as one of the nightly celebrity guests on Ken Murray's long-running popular Blackouts vaudeville-style show at the vast El Capitan theater where Citizen Kane had received its Hollywood premiere three years before. Orson presented two bits of magic — one card trick and a trick at a stage table.327

  At one of producer Darryl Zanuck’s fashionable evening parties that year Orson remarked: “I’m not really an educated man and I wish I were. I’d love to read The Odyssey in the original Greek and the Bible in the original Hebrew.” A clever remark. Just what his listeners would expect from Orson. All his listeners except director George Cukor (Little Women, The Women, The Philadelphia Story). Cukor had recognized the lines. They were straight from an unpublished book that he’d read earlier that day—the galleys of Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, which he’d just received from the bestselling British novelist’s agent. Cukor was less bothered by Orson’s plagiarism (and possible intent to direct and act in the film) than by the agent’s having led him to believe he, Cukor, was the only person in Hollywood with a copy. Cukor soon discovered that Orson’s wasn’t the only other one — Maugham’s agent had been papering the town with copies.328

  MEXICAN MELODRAMA During this period Orson and Rita made frequent impromptu visits to Mexico where he spent much of the time in Mexico City with David Bamberg. On one trip in 1944 he found his friend suffering from a double hernia recently acquired in a fall while doing his own stunt work for his fifth movie thriller, El Museo del Crimen (The Crime Museum). The day before David was scheduled for reparative surgery he casually mentioned to Orson that his young Anglo-Mexican girlfriend had told him she'd been successfully cured of a swollen appendix by a medium whose guiding spirit was a Mexican Indian medicine man who'd been dead a hundred years. The girl had a faint white scar where the “invisible" knife had cut and her mother had confirmed her story. Orson was excited and pressed David into cancelling his hospital appointment and trying this form of psychic surgery.329

  326Gloria Vandebilt, Black Knight, White Knight (New York: Knopf, 1987), 140-141, 144.

  327Ray Seery telephone interview, 4 Apr 93, and letter, 6 Apr 93. Seery, then in the Navy, was in the audience. For the BlackoutsBlackouts 1949) see Ken Murray, Life on a Pogo Stick: Autobiography of a Comedian (Philadelphia & Toronto: Winston, 1960), throughout. 328Gavin Lambert, On Cukor (New York: Putnam's, 1972), 228. This story is copied by E. Levy, George Cukor (1994), 157; and G. F. Custen,

  Twentieth Century's Fox: Daryl F. Zanuck (1997), 282.

  “That evening", David recalled, “I drove my girlfriend, her mother and Orson to the medium's house in a rather poor neighborhood in the suburbs of the city. On the way we decided not to use our real names. Orson was to be ‘Mr. Smith' and I was ‘Mr. F. Amber'(Forever bAMBERg!)."

  The medium—a short, stout woman in a long-sleeved sweater with wide pockets—received them herself and explained about her spirit guide. Then, David wrote: She sat on a sofa and after a long pause she jumped up and, plucking a bunch of dead, dried stems from a vase, she waved them in the air, bending and twisting her body all the while and then, suddenly, she broke the packet of stems in half, close to Orson's face, as the perfume of fresh flowers permeated the air. Then she went into a trance and, in a passable imitation of an old man's voice, she told of his
past triumphs while she passed her hands over my body, finally stopping at the groin where I had my inguinal hernias. I felt like a blasted idiot during all this, but Orson sat there with a deadpan face and hawk eyes.

  Next she: started weaving and waving around again, picking up the dead stems and throwing them into the air all around her. During one of these gyrations she came quite close to Orson, who, just at that moment, leaned over to pick up one of the stems and accidentally brushed against her. She returned to the sofa and continued with the mediumistic ritual for awhile. Then she put her hands into the pockets of her sweater and instantly she came out of her trance. Her eyes darted to the floor, then to Orson, who was sitting without any expression. And then, asking to be excused for a moment, she hurriedly left the room. After a long pause she returned and mentioned something about a powerful magical influence that emanated from one of us. She glared at Orson, and continued saying that this had destroyed her contact with her Indian doctor and we were politely asked to leave.

  “I left the girl and her mother at their home and drove Orson to his hotel. He invited me up to his room and the first thing he did was to take a small glass phial from his pocket and hold it under my nose. It was the same smell of fresh flowers from the medium's seance. Orson was as happy as a school boy as he showed me how he had picked her pocket when he had `accidentally' brushed against her. I must say his timing was perfect as I didn't see him swipe the phial, and I have an eye for that sort of thing. He went through the flower routine in his room, using the artificial flowers the Hotel Majestic provided." David phoned the hospital and rescheduled conventional surgery.330

  329 Bamberg (1988), 247-249. Orson told this story to his friend, Merv Griffin who amusingly garbles it in the retelling — Bamberg becomes "Mamburg" and he becomes the exposed "medium". See Griffin (1982), 36-37.