Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1

by Barton Whaley

  Although soon ended, their affair led to an enduring friendship. During that time Orson has said she twice turned to him for support in those terrible suicidal moments that plagued her from 1950 until her death 19 years later from a barbiturate overdose.

  * * * On Thursday, May 24th, Orson’s racial color-blindness was publically acknowledged. That evening the Interracial Film and Radio Guild (IFRG) held its second annual International Motion Picture and Radio Unity Awards Assembly. The IFRG’s motto was “Seeking Interracial Harmony Through International Unity.” The ceremony was held in LA’s vast Shrine Civic Auditorium (a future home of the Academy Awards). The award winners for 1945 included Orson Welles, Lena Horne, Bette Davis, Earl Robinson, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Bing Crosby, Norman Corwin, Miguel C. Torres, and James Wong Howe.384

  379 Hood, letter to Hoover, 9 Apr 1945. The blacked-out name covers 6+7 spaces and an assumed comma.

  380Johnsson (1981), 64, quoting a 1951 letter.

  381Hood, letter to Hoover, 21 Apr 1945. The blacked-out name occupies 14 spaces plus an assumed comma

  382Interviews with Shifra Haran and OW in Leaming (1985), 305, Leaming (1989),118-119.

  383The unpublished autobiography of Garland’s makeup artist, Dorothy Ponedel, as cited in Gerald Clarke, Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland (New York: Random House, 2000), 217, where the author dates their affair to Winter 1945.

  * * * On July 24th Orson was at the CBS radio studios in Hollywood rehearsing the narration for a CBS network show to be broadcast that evening. It had been written and was being directed by Norman Corwin who had recently moved his weekly Columbia Presents Corwin series from New York to Hollywood. Corwin had become one of radio's top director-writers after Orson went West.

  Maxine Marx, Chico's daughter and an actress on this show, thought Corwin was behaving “a little pompous in rehearsals". He'd pick out single words in the script and debate whether they were the best ones. Maxine noticed that Orson seemed to be getting miffed by this flaunting of erudition. Sidestepping a verbal battle with his director, Orson improvised one of his Odd Options. When Corwin found yet another offending word, Orson began analyzing its origins, tracing it back to its Greek roots. Having clearly been out-pompoused was enough to bring director Corwin back into the real world.385

  Corwin was in a unique position to critique Orson’s reading of this piece, “New York: A Tapestry for Radio”, because it repeated a broadcast made the previous year with that fine old Mercurian, Martin Gabel, as narrator:386

  Both interpretations were affirmative and challenging. Gabel gave it a youthful impetuousness; Welles, a mature and philosophic quality. Gabel shaped scenes, Welles concentrated on lines. From a standpoint of virtuosity it would be like comparing Horowitz and Rubenstein—each of them a master, each going his own way, each eminently listenable.

  * * * It was 14 August 1945. The rising sun caught Orson at the KFWB radio news desk in Los Angeles. He’d been there throughout the previous day and all night as a newscaster. He was keeping vigil for the bulletin that would announce Japan’s surrender—the end of World War II.387

  Over in Hollywood at CBS’s KNX studios, Norman Corwin had also been up that night drafting from scratch his long-delayed script for some kind of VJ-Day special. He’d finally managed to compress and simplify his dramatic text to one that required only three music cues and one sound effect (a single cannon shot, repeated four times), all within its 14 minutes of narrative. Deciding that morning he wanted a single voice to read it, he phoned Orson who, although 36 hours without sleep, came directly over to begin a brief rehearsal.

  At air time, Orson delivered the lines of Corwin’s simple prose elegy:388 Congratulations for being alive and listening.

  Millions didn’t make it.

  ...

  The turtle is young at sixty-one, but the flier is dead at eighteen. ...

  They’ve given their noons to their country,

  They’ve trusted their girls to you.

  They are face to face with an ally’s earth

  For a bunch of tomorrows.

  384 Leon H. Hardwick (editor) The Universal Screen and Radio Digest (Los Angeles,: 1945), 9.

  385Maxine Marx, Growing Up with Chico (Englewood Cliffs: New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 163.

  386Corwin (1947), 333.

  387Corwin (1947), 506.

  388Corwin (1947), 499-504.

  Corwin described Orson’s performance: “He was a very tired man ..., but he attacked the script with an energy and gusto that shook amplifying tubes all over the network.”389 This broadcast, enthusiastically received at the time, is still appreciated as an American radio classic.

  * * * During his Hollywood years Orson was occasionally mistaken for Bob Hope (and vice versa) and approached by Hope fans for autographs. Aside from the fact that Orson was then clean-shaven and both men had dark hair and round faces with upturned noses, the resemblance wasn't even close except in profile. But whenever this mistake happened, Orson, suddenly all courtesy, would simply forge Hope's name. Hope, unwilling to admit any resemblance to Orson, never reciprocated.390

  FILM AND LIFE Summer's end found Orson's chum Dick Himber trying to put together a magical musical. He called it Abracadabra. It had been dreamed up by wealthy perfumer Eugene Fink as backer and it was Orson who had put Himber onto Fink. Orson's only other contribution to the show was an eight-minute flick unimaginatively titled Magic Film. Dick phoned Cy Endfield to invite him to a Columbia projection room for a private screening of this mini-movie. Orson's late-as-usual arrival, with Rita Hayworth in tow, was marked by their silly banter:391

  ORSON: Sorry we're late folks. [Pointing behind him.] This is Mrs. Orson Welles. RITA (scathingly): What's this "Mrs. Orson Welles" crap?

  ORSON: I'm Rita Hayworth!

  When the film was shown, Cy realized it was a kind of magical practical joke between Orson and Dick Himber. It showed Orson, surrounded by four admiring starlets, doing half of a card trick that Himber would have to interact with as Orson's live assistant together with a live audience volunteer.

  Himber's backers insisted on a legal release for this film snippet before they'd commit. Orson, annoyed by them, advised his friend Dick that “Any knowledgable showman will tell you that if your backers demand a release from as well as the film before entering a conditional agreement with you, they aren't backers you can accept and keep your self-respect." This advice accurately portrayed the sanctity of verbal contracts in Hollywood, as most recently seen in the 1993 jury award of $9 million (later reduced by courts to $7 million and finally to nil) to Main Line Pictures for actress Kim Basinger's having backed out of an alleged hand-shake movie deal. Despite his misgivings Orson twice phoned his lawyer to hurry the release along to his friend.392

  389Corwin (1947), 506.

  390Ray Seery telephone interviews, 4 Apr & 20 Jul 93, based on early conversations with both OW and Hope. OW recalled the resemblance in a 1984 interview in Leaming (1985), 122.

  391Endfield audiotape (Fall 1992). Dick's Abracadabra show never played and six years later he sold all its magical gear to magic dealer Ted Collins.393 All except Orson's film which continued to sit on Dick's shelf a further year until he managed to premier it in another magic musical. And 46 years after the film's creation illusionist David Copperfield would rediscover and revive it to international acclaim and an ugly lawsuit, as we'll see.

  The idea of a live stage magician interacting with a filmed assistant had first been conceived by Polish-American conjuror Horace Goldin in his “From Film to Life" illusion, which he'd premiered way back in 1920 at the New York Palace. Goldin's version had the spectacular kicker of the flesh-and-blood girl stepping out of the screen to conclude the trick on stage with Goldin.394

  Film director-comedian Buster Keaton reversed this theme four years later in his Sherlock Junior, which Orson as an avid Keaton fan had probably seen as a nine-year old. In the title role the great comedian is a movie-house film projectionist unjustl
y accused of thievery. Falling asleep in the projection booth while showing a movie about a theft, his dream self walks down to the screen and attempts to enter it. But the actors—who are now the people he'd confronted in his real-life dilemma—repulse his intrusion into their world. When he succeeds in entering the screen via the building's front door, he becomes the splendidly attired Sherlock Junior and, by solving the movie crime, learns how to prove his innocence in the real world.395

  Amazingly, this perfect illusion was accomplished without any special camera effects. As Keaton explained, “We built a stage with a big, black cut-out screen. Then we built the front row of seats and orchestra pit and everything else. It was our lighting that did it. We lit the stage so that it looked like a motion picture being projected on the screen.

  * * * Orson continued to work on Don Quixote from 1959 to 1965. In 1967 French movie director Jean-Luc Goddard released Les Carabiniers, a comic satire on war in which one of the country bumpkin protagonists sees his first movie and attempts to interact with it. I wonder whether he’s been inspired by either having seen Keaton’s version or having heard of Orson’s.

  Six decades after Keaton, Woody Allen, an avid magic buff, would repeat Golden's original effect in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) by having the romantic lead leave the film to join his enthralled movie fan. Allen's inspiration was neither Keaton nor Goldin—on his own he had conceived the premise of the film character coming to life and only years later figured out the rest of the plot.396 Like Orson, who had defined film as “a ribbon of dreams", both Keaton and Allen often used their movies to portray the seeming paradox that the reality of cinema is all illusion.

  392 OW draft night letter to Himber, around Aug 45; OW draft telegram to Himber, 1 Sep 45.

  393"Frank Joglar" [Milbourne Christopher] in Hugard's Magic Monthly, Vol.8, No.9 (Feb 1951), 758.

  394Milbourne Christopher, The Illustrated History of Magic (New York: Crowell, 1973), 312; Walter Gibson, Magic Explained (New York: Vista House, 1958), 167-169. Note that Méliès had made movie shorts in which an actor interacts with a photograph of himself that comes to life (A Mysterious Portrait, 1899) and a painted image that comes to life to join the actor (The Living Playing Cards, 1905). See Barnouw (1981), 93.

  395Tom Dardis, Keaton (New York: Scribner's, 1979), 106-107. [check Kevin Brownlow, The Parade's Gone By (New York: Knopf, 1969).

  396Eric Lax, Woody Allen: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1991), 99.

  Goldin's original Film to Life was revived by Howard Thurston during an entire season. Perhaps Orson had seen that version. No other magician presented this illusion until 1953 when Sorcar did, or at least planned to do, in India with film footage he'd shot that year in England.

  Why is Goldin's most wondrous effect so rarely seen? Orson's old friend Walter Gibson explained: “The cost of producing the film, the necessity of always having the same girl, and the need of the services of a motion-picture operator, plus the fact that the illusion is suitable only for a regular theater stage—all were reasons why ‘Film to Life' belonged strictly to a large vaudeville act or a full evening magic show".397 Then in 1935 the leading British magic magazine reported the identical effect being performed in a cinema by an unnamed live magician where cards chosen by the audience were called by a “priestess" on the screen.398 This innovation greatly reduced Goldin's illusion in both expense and scale to one suitable for a small stage with a small screen and 16mm home-movie projector.

  The 1945 Welles-Himber routine, comedy theme, and patter lines were original with them, although the basic effect clearly wasn't. As Himber wasn't a particularly inventive magician but more an improver and marketer, it surely was Orson who'd suggested the film-to-life gimmick.399 And Orson, as a voracious reader of magic literature, had likely been inspired by either the Goldin or Priestess versions or even by seeing Thurston's presentation. Moreover, Orson was already deeply involved in exploring the limits of film, including the ways it could overlap into multi-media applications. Indeed he'd planned seven years earlier to use a similar stunt in his revival of Too Much Johnson (1938). That play was to open on a movie screen. For the next 20 minutes the audience was to see a short black-and-white 16mm silent film that Orson had directed for the occasion. In Keystone Kops style—the undercranked camera giving unnaturally fast and jerky motion—the lovers (Jo Cotten and Arlene Francis) are discovered in her bedroom by her irate husband (Edgar Barrier). This triggers a crazy chase across rooftops and through Central Park to New York harbor where Cotten boards a cruise ship that is just pulling away while Barrier clings to its sides. The curtain was to rise as he leaps from the screen onto the stage, which was set as the ship's deck. Unable to get the film edited in time, the show's brief run played without it.400

  Orson had, as we've seen, revived this stunt the following year (1939) for his vaudeville tour of The Green Goddess melodrama. That 20-minute playlet opened with an establishing scene comprising four minutes of stock film footage, which blurred the conventional frame that separated the live vaudeville intermissions from the movies being shown in theaters in those days. And two years later Citizen Kane included an effect where Orson as Kane seemingly walks into a group photograph to emerge in a live scene with the same group.

  He next pulled an interesting switch on the interaction theme. As described above, his Mercury Wonder Show had included an act billed as “A Voice From the Dead". In that segment an on-stage Orson did a card trick by exchanging patter with the “phonographic" voice of Cagliostro.

  397 Walter Gibson, Magic Explained (New York: Vista House, 1958), 169.

  398Reported by Vincent Dalban in The Magic Wand, Vol.24, No.168 (December 1935), 210-211. This act, titled "Y'Sani'— The Princess", was presented as a vaudeville intermission at a movie house.

  399Ed Brown telephone interview, 4 Aug 91; Phil Varricchio telephone interview, 21 Sep 93. Richard Himber: The Man and His Magic (1980), edited by Ed Levy, surveys most of the tricks in his repertoire, but neglects to point out that their effects and methods were, at most, Himber's presentations but never (or, at best, almost never) his inventions.

  400Brady (1989), 145-148; Higham (1970), 6-8; France (1977), 143-145.

  So finally with Himber in 1945, Orson grasped the chance to adapt this almost magical effect to true magic. He would later use versions of the film-to-life device in two stage productions and a movie: Around the World (1946) opened with a filmed scene and then intercut four others that ran a total of nearly half an hour.401 Most recently, in The Unthinking Lobster (1950), he'd intercut one filmed scene.402 And Orson would play with this theme one last time when filming Don Quixote (which he began in 1955). Set in modern times, one notably quixotic scene in a movie house has the time-travelled Spanish knight on horseback assault and tear through the screen with his lance in a mistaken effort to rescue a celluloid damsel in distress.403

  False rumors in 1945, begun by Hedda Hopper's widely syndicated gossip column, had Orson preparing to direct the never-to-be Himber-Fink show. Although Orson was sufficiently annoyed to issue disclaimers,404 the notion almost certainly inspired him to contemplate a similar project of his own that would begin to come together three months later. But first he had another movie to make.

  Back in Hollywood on September 1st Orson received a membership card for Bert Wheeler's Circle of Magic club. Bert had recently started this phoney club as a slick promotional stunt for his shop. To join all one had to do was buy a 50¢ trick or a catalog. Such promo “memberships", designed by otherwise more-or-less legitimate magic dealers to appeal to kids and childish adults, had been around since 1921 when a magic dealer started this scam in Brazil and they were issued by Supreme Magic Company in England until its recent demise. Nevertheless Orson kept this meaningless club card until 1978 when he sold it to the Lilly Library. I suppose he had accepted it as a joke and then kept it for sentiment, after Bert was killed ten months later when he accidentally crashed his airplane.

  During October and November Orso
n filmed The Stranger for RKO, which for $2,000 per week plus $50,000 on completion he co-wrote, directed, and acted in. His co-stars were Loretta Young and Edward G. Robinson. Usually, after the day's work, he'd gather whatever cast or crew he could in his studio bungalow, chatting with them while performing occasional bits of magic.405

  At this time Jack Cole was Rita’s choreographer at Columbia, friend, confidant, and her escort on those many evenings when Orson was occupied with work or women. He noticed how protective she was of Orson –- once at Columbia trying to track down and punch out visiting gossip columnist Hedda Hopper for her current nasty remarks about Orson. She’d often have Cole take her out dancing. One cold night she took him along to watch Orson shoot the famous clock-tower scene on the crowded set. Even so Cole was impressed that Orson took time to be introduced to Cole and engage in “all that kissy-kissy crap” to please his adoring wife. Then they waited while Orson finished the scene when he took them to the Beachcomber, a popular late-night eatery, where they just drank and unwound.406

  But Rita soon decided she’d had enough of Orson’s infidelities. While The Stranger was still being filmed she ordered him out of their Carmelina Drive home in Brentwood. After midnight, with two suitcases in hand, he went down the street to the corner house of neighbor Sam Spiegel and asked to crash there a few days. Sam, as producer of The Stranger, worried that the marital split would undermine Orson's ability to continue directing the film:407

  401 Brady (1989), 386-387.

  402Brady (1989), 455.

  403Stainton (1988), 254; Cowie (1973), 222.

  404See the flurry of telegrams and day letters from OW to Himber and others between 29 Aug [1945] and 1 Sep [1945] in the Lilly Library.