Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1

by Barton Whaley

  The election was held next day. Orson and Sinatra were both lodged at the Waldorf-Astoria. That evening the two new friends were alone at the hotel’s bar listening to the radio reports of the election results. There they celebrated FDR’s victory over Tom Dewey and began a long pub crawl that ended back at the Waldorf with an unsuccessful attempt to embarrass FDR hater Westbrook Pegler in his room.356

  Norman Corwin soon wrote Orson to pass along some chummy kudos from the Chairman of the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) who’d been active in the presidential campaign:357 Paul Porter ... spoke mellowly of the good old days of the campaign; and how he wanted to get the boys together down in the White House some one of these days so we can sit around and tell stories. According to Paul, you and I were mainly responsible for carrying Illinois and Pennsylvania; and your sore throat toward the end of the campaign was the only reason Ohio went bad.

  * * * Back in Hollywood a lunch on December 15th at the Brown Derby with business partner Jackson Leighter marked Orson's all-time biggest financial blunder. Contrary to Leighter's advice and behind his back, Orson (lying that he had a date with a woman) slipped off to the RKO offices where he bought the footage and rights to It's All True on the studio's three harsh conditions:

  1) Release RKO from any obligation to Orson for a third movie without paying the $125,000 severance.

  2) Pay RKO $197,500 in installments.

  3) Surrender his claim to 20% of any future net profits from Citizen Kane.

  The Great Evader didn't even have the courage to mention this rash action to his partner, who learned the truth next day when RKO asked him for a $20,000 Mercury check for the first installment.358 356 Sinatra (1995), 64. Different versions of what happened that evening are in Kitty Kelley, His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra (New York: Bantam, 1986), 99; and Shawn Levy, Rat Pack Confidential (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 68-69.

  357Corwin letter to OW, 15 Jan 1945, in Corwin (1994), 84.

  358Leaming (1985), 300. But see Higham (1985), 219, for a different account.

  Early next year (1945) Sergeant Bill Willard was working in Van Nuys at the U.S. Army's Birmingham General Hospital, the main rehabilitation hospital in the Los Angeles area for troops wounded in the South Pacific. In Special Services it was his job to arrange entertainment for recuperating soldiers. Fortunately he had Staff Sergeant Desi Arnaz in his unit to help recruit volunteers from the Hollywood crowd. Hoping to snag Orson, Willard and another soldier drove an Army truck down to Orson's big rented home in Brentwood. Orson agreed to do an hour show and the three men discussed its specific content. Orson explained the kind of magic and readings he could do but took their advice as to what specific material would go over best with this special audience. Willard found him “very easy" to work with. Unfortunately, Orson had to decline a request that Rita accompany him.

  The show had Orson on stage and down into the audience, many of whose members had to view the act from hospital gurneys that had been wheeled in. He did mostly small magic, prestidigitation, card tricks, and mindreading. By special request from those who knew his radio shows he added a few brief recitations.359 This was the first time he combined magic with dramatic readings. It wouldn't be the last.

  Sometime in the mid-1940s Orson agreed to do a magic act at a big Hollywood birthday bash at the Hillcrest Country Club celebrating movie mogul Louis B. Mayer. “It was", Orson recalled, “the golden age of Hollywood when we gave birthday parties for those dinosaurs who ran the big studios." He'd prepared a short routine with a few of his best tricks. It was a long wait in the wings while other stars preceded him. When young Judy Garland finished her songs around 4 AM, Orson decided to leave without performing. “So I went home with a ruined suit" — the rabbit loaded into a secret pocket having urinated “roughly twenty-seven times", or so it seemed. This experience dampened his spirits for giving unpaid performances.360 Years later when asked “What makes a good magician?" he quipped, “He's a man who can get the rabbit out in time."361

  Orson took in stride these command-performance impositions by the mighty lords of Hollywood; and, good Machiavellian that he was, delighted in opportunities to pay them back by using his powers of deception—that last resort of pawns versus kings. Thus, during a period when David O. Selznick would invite Orson and other luminaries to his mansion every Sunday to play charades, Orson discovered that his autocratic host was a very bad loser even in such a seemingly inconsequential social setting:362

  So I began to organize the steady guests so that no matter how the teams were divided we would throw the game, and David would lose. This went on Sunday after Sunday, and the evenings always ended up with our genial host cursing us mercilessly, following us out to the parking lot telling us what bastards we were. He was a bigger, more manic and monstrous ego-dizzy man than all the rest.

  But Orson could work comfortably with such a creature, even cautiously admire him, because Selznick “was also a man of enormous gifts: a real producer."

  * * * Around early spring Orson recorded eight quarter-hour radio pilots for the Eversharp pen and pencil company under the title Orson Welles' Eversharp Almanac. It was planned as a “radio column" (rather like his current newspaper column) for broadcast over the CBS network every Friday evening at 7:30. But the sponsor backed out and the shows never aired. Only the recordings survive.363 359 Bill Willard telephone interview, 17 May 91. Willard misplaces Orson’s home in Bel Air.

  360Tynan (1961/1967), 291. In his 1982 With Orson Welles interview Orson described this incident, mentioning the presence as performers of Judy Garland, Danny Kaye, Danny Thomas, and Al Jolson. If so, this dates the party to sometime between 1944 (when Kaye made his Hollywood debut) and 1950 (when Jolson died). He also mentions the presence of Jack Benny and George Burns in Ward (1983), 33.

  361OW in With Orson Welles (1982).

  362Quoted in Griffin (1982), 139.

  The 6th pilot episode was devoted to a denunciation of fortune-tellers and psychics. Asserting that it's all humbug, Orson claims that he can reproduce their results by “trickery" known to magicians. To prove his point, he makes two predictions under “test conditions": Next week's headline in the Nome, Alaska, Evening Standard and the number of pieces that would result from Betty Grable's smashing an object of her choice with a hammer. His predictions are sealed in separate envelopes that are placed in a safety-deposit box and handed over to Bank of America vice-president Bernard Giannini for tamper-proof keeping in a vault.364

  As promised, the next episode opened with the revelation of these predictions. He announced the distinguished studio committee: comedian Jack Benny, pin-up movie star Betty Grable, producer Walter Wanger, and newspaper publisher Manchester Boddy. His headline prediction, “REPORT NEW RAID ON TOKYO", was letter-perfect, as confirmed via telephone from the Evening Standard's editor, Joseph C. Leland; And the number of pieces (72) into which Miss Grable hammered a kewpie doll was correct.365 We've seen Orson's fondness for prediction tricks, but this was his first of what would become many attempts at working the stunning Sealed Prediction version.

  I realized that neither prediction was possible under the “test conditions" Orson had announced. They had to be fakes. This set me wondering what else in this radio series had been faked. Bernard Giannini was a real B-of-A veep but was disqualified from the role of unbiased keeper of the secret message by virtue of the fact that he was an amateur conjuror whom Orson had previously met at a Los Magicos meeting. Orson had even saved himself the cost of a long-distance phone call to Alaska—editor Joseph C. Leland was a fictitious name, probably based on Joseph C[otten] plus [Jedediah] Leland, the role Cotten had played in Citizen Kane. Moreover, Nome never had an Evening Standard newspaper. I leave it to others to determine which, if any, of the cast played themselves or were just cleverly mimicked by Orson or other voice doubles. In short, the whole show was a kind of hoax. After all, it was just a sales presentation to the Eversharp company to show format and probably never int
ended for actual broadcast. Under those circumstances Orson was just having a bit of elaborate fun at minimum cost.

  * * * That March he agreed for a $20,000 fee from brand new International Pictures to star in Tomorrow Is Forever opposite Claudette Colbert, ex-wife of his director-friend Norman Foster. Miss Colbert had got him the part, having insisted to producer Bill Goetz that “The male lead is an Orson Welles part –- only he can do justice to it –- even though he may prove to be better than I am.” Orson appeared on the set later that month. Warned by friends and associates that Orson would try to dominate the movie as he had in Jane Eyre and concerned that he would overplay his part as meek and sensitive “Kessler,” Colbert with help from director Irving Pichel got Orson to suppress the dramatic excesses that had marked his portrayal of “Mr. Rochester” in the previous film. Pichel, a former character actor, talked to Orson as one actor to another. And 17-year-old Richard Long would later recall that Miss Colbert found Orson “a trial more often than she would admit, but she got him to scale-down and underplay. She got him to follow her lead.”366

  363 Wood (1990), 136.

  364Tape of Orson Welles' Eversharp Almanac, Episode 6 (1945).

  365Tape of Orson Welles' Eversharp Almanac, Episode 7 (1945).

  Although Orson admired his delightful co-star, he was so bored during his six weeks on the set of this “weepy" little film that he worked a practical joke at her expense to enliven the cast and crew during a scene in which her head would be in his lap. He had a prop man prepare a diabolical device. During the take, her head properly positioned, he pulled a string that caused the gadget concealed in his trousers to expand into a “very impressive fake penis". However the joke went limp when Miss Colbert gave no response—then or later—leaving Orson to ponder the possibilities: “She didn't know whether to jump up and slap my face, to be complimented, or to ask me for a date!"367 However, Miss Colbert was perhaps just proving her proper manners, or what a seasoned trouper she was, or both. Or simply demonstrating a natural indifference to male gadgetry, – proud that she and first husband Norman Foster had not merely separate beds but separate homes, living apart to “keep our love alive” as their publicity put it in those prudish times.368

  All this assumes Orson’s story was truly more cock-than-bull. Perhaps in telling this story in 1983, Orson had just pilfered the 1947-48 true story of Errol Flynn’s dressing room prank of exposing himself wearing a giant prosthesis.

  Whatever Orson’s relations with Claudette Colbert, he showed impeccable manners with Natalie Wood during the scene where she sat in his lap. No pranks with this six-year-old, particularly as Orson never had a Lolita Complex.

  Young Natalie relished both Orson’s and Claudette’s affectionate attention and concern for her on the set. And even that of Orson’s midget valet Shorty with whom she said she became “great pals” between takes. Orson observed that Shorty “was the only person on the set smaller than she was.”369 Natalie needed such warm attention, although none there knew of the horror underlying her performance driven by a mother who was the ultimate Stage Mother From Hell.370

  Natalie recalled Orson amusing her between scenes by “always doing magic tricks" and “always pulling cards out of my pigtails.371 “People said Orson Welles was overpowering and theatrical; but,” she remarked, “I found him most kind.”372 In her role as Orson's foster daughter, this was the star-crossed actress’s first major movie appearance (at $100 per week).

  Although Orson was on good behavior on the set between takes, the actual filming had at least one of those Orsonian moments. As Natalie Wood observed one of these fights between Orson and the movie’s director, Irving Pichel:373

  It had something to do with moving his chair. He had to sit in an armchair and I had to sit in his lap. As he sat down, he shifted his chair off its mark and the cameraman said, “Mr. Welles, would you mind shifting your chair back so it will be in the light?”

  366 Colbert 1981 interview in Quirk (1985), 147-148.

  367OW 26 Jul 83 interview in Leaming (1985), 299.

  368Quirk (1985), 10.

  369OW quoted in Warren G. Harris, Natalie & R.J. (New York: Doubleday, 1988),24.

  370Finstad (2001), 31-33.

  371Wood interview in Dick Moore, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 174; and Finstad (2001), 37.

  372Wood interview of 1965 in Quirk (1985), 147.

  373Wood interview in Moore 1984), as cited above.

  He said, “This is the way I’m going to sit,” and they got into this incredible beef and Welles made them change the lighting rather than move his chair. The studio had Natalie’s own dark Russian hair bleached blond and braided for her role as an Austrian refugee. Orson said, “She was so good, she was terrifying” – “already a perfect little pro.” For whatever reason Orson recalled doing this scene six or seven times. “Should have been one take,” he confessed, but I kept blowing my lines.374

  Although a trivial tear-jerker, Tomorrow is Forever proved a box-office success when released next year and made Orson again a much sought-after movie actor.

  * * * Orson was in San Francisco in late April for the international founding meeting of the United Nations, which opened April 25th. He attended several weekends, commuting from LA. Again coached by Louis Dolivet, he was still testing the possibilities of a career in politics. One of history’s quirkier footnotes is that Dolivet actually had the audacity to lobby for Orson’s being made the UN’s first Secretary General. Orson was almost as flattered as when FDR had suggested he run for the US Senate.375 Although Dolivet failed to gather support for Orson he certainly had the right connections — his closest friend, Henri Laugier, became the UN's first Assistant Secretary General for Social Affairs.376

  One morning in San Francisco, following a tiring night of carousing with diplomats, Orson wanted to dodge a scheduled speaking engagement. He successfully tried a variant of the pretend-cripple ploy he'd used three years before in Chicago: When the organizers arrived to pick him up he hobbled out to make his excuses on a pair of crutches—obtained that day by his secretary.377

  Orson’s trips up to the UN conferences as well as his speaking tours for Dolivet’s Free World organization were being closely monitored by the FBI. The LA office had managed to acquire a willing informant in Orson’s entourage. Although unnamed in released FBI documents, the informant was female and – judging from the type of information she sent along on travel itineraries and schedules and budgets — obviously one of the secretaries or clerks in the Mercury front office from around March 1945 until sometime late that year.378

  His absences from home while making Tomorrow is Forever had triggered Rita's deep fear of desertion. On returning home he would often be met by a crying scene and accusations of philandering at the studio. Her charges were false—at first.

  Unable to control this domestic crisis, Orson began to spend more social time out. Unknown to him these fun times were being regularly reported to FBI Director Herbert Hoover by Richard B. Hood, Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the Bureau's large Los Angeles field office. A report in early April from Hood mentioned that “WELLES spends considerable evenings engaged in extra-marital activities with [name deleted], former Main Street [downtown LA] burlesque strip tease artist, who has recently promoted herself to a higher type of nightclub appearances in this city."379

  374 Quirk (1985), 144.

  375Leaming (1985), 304, interviews with Dolivet and OW.

  376A. J. Hobbins, "[John P.] Humphrey and the Old Revolution," Fontanas, Vol.8 (1995), 121-136.

  377Leaming (1985), 305, presumably based on an interview with OW. The secretary was probably Shifra Haran who regularly travelled with her boss in this period.

  378Http://findlaw.com/apbnews/s/20001013/apborson.html.

  So who was Miss Name Deleted? Almost certainly Miss Lili St. Cyr who was already known as the "Queen of the Strippers". In this period she'd recently moved up-scale from Main Street dives to stripping in two
of Hollywood's dressier niteries, the fashionable but plebeian Florentine Gardens and the posh Ciro’s. Local gossip linked her romantically with both Orson and Victor Mature as well as Paul Muni and Frank Sinatra. The omni-sexual Miss St. Cyr indeed had both male and female lovers (including reportedly Marilyn Monroe) and counted Ted Jordan among her five husbands. At 27 she fit a type that appealed to Orson for more than drunken one-nighters — intelligent, mature, a strikingly sculpted face, tall (5'9"), and a dancer's body that, profiled at 34-24-34 inches, was memorably slim for someone in her profession, Moreover, as movie scriptwriter Nunnally Johnson, wrote, she was "one of the most elegant strippers ever to take on the G-string."380 As it's unlikely that LA's FBI special agents would personally gum-shoe Orson on these amorous outings, I presume SAC Hood was just funneling the abundant local gossip to his purient Boss.

  Whatever the truth of Hood's allegation about the stripper, his follow-up report later that month probably correctly reported Orson's current “affair" with a “movie actress who recently has been receiving considerable publicity."381 Although her name is blotted out in the recently declassified document, she was possibly Judy Garland.

  The 23-year-old Miss Garland had recently announced her engagement to bi-sexual director Vincente Minnelli but continued to date other men. But secretly. One was Orson with whom she had a brief fling that winter of 1945. Clandestine lovers always risk discovery and their’s had at least two near misses. Once by Rita Hayworth when she saw a huge basket of flowers in the back of Orson’s car and assumed it was for her. Quick-witted Shifra Haran, aware of the situation, ran out and retrieved his card to Garland.382 The other close call was the night Judy had forgotten she’d made dates for an intimate dinner with both fiancé Minnelli and lover Orson. Dinner was cooking and she was with her makeup artist, Dorothy Ponedel, when she heard Minnelli’s car pull into the driveway. Realizing her error, she explained it to Ponedel and they rushed out to intercept him before Orson could arrive too. Ponedel told Minnelli that he’d have to take Judy out to some restaurant because the stove was smoking.383