Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1

by Barton Whaley

  405Brady (1989), 379. Although Brady writes that OW got only $50,000 for The Stranger.

  406Cole interview in John Kobol, People Will Talk (New York: Knopf, 1985), 596-597, 601.

  We sat up all night talking, and Orson unburdened himself to me at great length. He was in a mood of the most acute depression when we finally left for the studio, and I had great misgivings. On the set, however, his personal problems were forgotten. He applied himself to his work with his usual painstaking brilliance, as if he hadn't a care in the world. ... During the day he did his job efficiently, but in the evenings his melancholia would return, and he would sit for hours just staring at the wall.

  Sam was too discreet to tell the interviewer that Orson did usually perk up enough to appreciate the distractions his considerate sophisticated libertine host provided both of them—a nightly stream of casting-couch women, Sam’s own preference being very young ones, often two or more at once. This was the era when "starlet" was aptly defined by Ben Hecht as any aspiring actress under twenty not employed full-time in a brothel. (And this was just two years before starlet Marilyn Monroe joined Sam’s stable and bedded Orson in an almost forgettable one-nighter.)408

  One day that month Orson entertained with his magic at a World War II victory celebration for Admiral William “Bull" Halsey at the Ambassador Hotel. Joe Hayman reported that the great Admiral had brought a saddle and asked for a horse to match. When Orson the Magnificent failed to materialize one, a Boy Scout upstaged Orson and got a big laugh by presenting the Admiral with a tiny white plastic horse.409

  Although Orson finished directing The Stranger a day under schedule and under budget, he was unhappy about the studio cut. He'd agreed to do a hack job and he had; but without “cynicism", as he said with professional pride.410 It was an interesting but minor movie executed efficiently. For stimulation Orson relied on his practical jokes and sex. By the end of filming Orson was his thinnest in years, thanks to a rigorous diet, daily hypodermic shots, and—it pleased him to claim—the attentions of an actress who had become his current affair until she decided to pull a Houdini, vanishing into Mexico with Billie Holiday.411 However, even if his anonymous actress took a holiday, it almost certainly wasn’t Billie. That great blues singer was busy the entire last half of that year touring the East and South, with no time off except to return to New York City to bury her mother.412 In any case, Orson returned to monogamy, he and Rita reconciled, and he moved back in with her.

  JOKERS WILD Orson had set up one of his practical jokes for his final scene in The Stranger. As the escaped Nazi war criminal, trapped at the top of a 124-foot clock tower, he falls to his death. Bulky cinematographer Russell Metty was up a tree filming the stunt man's drop. Metty was allowed only one take because otherwise the stunter would get double pay on this tight-budget thriller. As Orson recalled, “The next day at rushes we put in all the sound effects over black film in order to make Russell think he'd forgotten to rack over. It's the sort of cruelty that was common on the sets in those days."413

  407Spiegel interview in Noble (1956), 163.

  408Andrew Sinclair, Spiegel: The Man Behind the Pictures (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), 45; OW interview of 13 Jul 1984 in Leaming (1989), 120, 125.

  409Joe Hayman, "Harpings from Hayman" column in Conjurors' Magazine, Vol.1, No.10 (Nov 1945), 34.

  410Naremore (1978), 150.

  411OW in Leaming (1985), 191.

  412As is clear from her itinerary as reported by her biographers Chilton, Clarke, and Nicholson..

  A cynic might title this chapter “Machiavelli as Sadist". We've seen notable examples of Orson's practical joking. Their full significance, just as with his music and magic have been missed. In fact, among the practitioners of that perverse activity he ranked world-class. Soren S. “Sam" Adams rated Orson Welles one of America's nine most eminent practical jokers of the 1940s, along with Orson's friends Dick Himber and Milton Berle.414 This was a high accolade indeed considering the source. Adams (who modestly implied his own rating was either 10th or 1st) had invented and patented the world-infamous Sneeze Powder (in 1904), the Snake Can (1910), the Dribble Glass (around 1910), and the Joy Buzzer (in 1932). These four enduring boons to inhumanity were only the best known of over 650 joke-shop items that he'd invented or developed and wholesaled since founding the notorious S. S. Adams Company in New Jersey in 1904.

  Fourteen years later Adams added a strong line of magician's props, which would eventually account for 25% of his business (with 65% for joke items and 10% for puzzles). If it seems odd to sell practical jokes, puzzles, and magic side-by-side, the reader need only realize that they share similar psychologies and consequently have a considerable overlap in clientele.

  First let's distinguish puzzles from magic. Conjuror Bill Okal has explained, “Magic is entertaining, unsolved puzzles are annoying."415 Okal is a bit too kind to the all-too-many inferior magicians who present tricks as if they were just puzzlements to be solved. Straight puzzle-solving or designing is a lonely mind exercise while magic is a social exercise in deceptive psychological manipulation of the spectator's mind by the performer.

  Bridging the gap between puzzles and conjuring, practical jokes add the dimension of social interaction between joker and victim. In his sensitive profile of Richard Himber, Maurice Zolotow, biographer and amateur magician, probed the similarities and differences between these two activities and concluded:416

  There is a curious affinity between conjuring and practical joking. Persons who like to perform magical tricks usually like to play practical jokes on their friends. The same firms that manufacture magical gimmicks also manufacture squirting roses and exploding fountain pens. On one level, the end result of a trick or a [practical] joke is the same: one party in the relationship has asserted his superiority over the other, has gained transient power in an uneasy situation. The magician seeks to mystify.... And the practical japester's goal is the open discomfiture of somebody whom he manages to reduce to absurdity by placing in a ridiculous position. The magician achieves an imaginary equality in a situation and asserts himself by raising his own status, the jokester by lowering the victim's.

  Machiavellians would object only to Zolotow's further assertion (he was an avowed Freudian) that the drive for power is “neurotic". If true, only the neurotics among teenagers, citizens, or slaves would use their limited powers to resist oppressive parents, bosses, bureaucrats, or any other tyrants who wield their greater power to victimize.

  413 OW in his 1982 TV interview in With Orson Welles.

  414Zolotow (1952), 122.

  415Bill Okal, A New Look at Some Classic Close-Up (1988), 17.

  416Zolotow (1952), 94.

  Zolotow was on firmer ground when he pointed out that most of Himber's japes were a payback for cruel teasing from his friends, a warning to them that he'd couldn't be trifled with except at some cost. He believed that Himber's type of indirect response was less worthy than direct confrontation, but recognized that this was healthier than just passively accepting emotional assaults from “friends". Orson carried his practical joking a step beyond Himber. Except for the occasional tricking of strangers and other innocents (the toll-taker, the waltzing assistant, or cinematographer Metty), his main targets were persons who abused their authority, their power over him.

  Orson's inspiration was his mother, an exception to the notion that women don't excel at practical joking—an inequality that may be in their favor. However, Orson was proud of his mother's talent for the art. His favorite story had her standing halfway down a city bloc, a ball of string in one hand, until a stranger started to walk past. She stopped him politely and asked if he could spare a few moments to help her in a project. Confronted by a smartly dressed and poised matron, he agreed. So she handed him the free end of the string and, explaining only that he hold it taught, began walking down the block, letting the ball unravel. Reaching the end of the block, she turned the corner and continued around the next where she walked up to a gentleman
standing by a doorway and asked if he would hold the ball and string tight. When he did so she retreated back along the line until out of sight of both men when she crossed the street to attend to other business.417 This, of course, is a famous practical joke,418 one that is most unlikely to have been original with Mrs. Welles; and, as we have only Orson's word, the attribution to her may even be apocryphal. But no matter—the very fact that he later associated it with her in memory tells us something important about him.

  That practical jokes delighted Orson suggests he intuitively understood the anatomy of deception. After all, hoaxes are, like magic, subcategories of that broader subject.419 Orson was one of those few persons who actively practice magic, practical jokes, hoaxes, con games, detective story writing, and other modes of deception as a way of life. That he did so in a usually benign manner (seldom maliciously) puts him clearly in an even smaller group—those who deceive for the sheer pleasure of it, to protect themselves against it, or both.

  Most conjurors stress the jolly aspect of their art. Few see, much less admit, its dark underbelly. An exception was magicians' magician Cy Endfield who argued that “Magic is an aggressive weapon against the audience as much as it is an entertainment."420 Cy saw this as his own main motive for having learned magic at age 12 or 13:421

  It seems to me now that from the very beginning of my interest in magic I knew there was a spurious aspect. For the price of a dime or a quarter, one could buy a knicknack that had some hidden little mechanism in it and at that moment outwit Einstein—at that moment humiliate Einstein by puzzling him, and congratulate oneself that one knew something Einstein didn't. I trace in my memory this understanding that magic has an aggressive component in it, that it derides the intelligence of its audience by obscure and underhanded devices.

  417 Jim Steinmeyer interview, 3 Mar 93. Leaming (1985), 6, also mentions Beatrice Welles' penchant for practical jokes, evidently based on what Orson had told her.

  418The invention has been credited to the famous British practical joker, W. Horace De Vere Cole (ca.1883 -1936) who ceased such shenanigans by 1912. See H. Allen Smith, The Compleat Practical Joker (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1953), 17-18; Norman Moss, The Pleasures of Deception (London: Chatto & Windus, 1977), 29.

  419Dr. R.V. Jones, a world-class practical joker and one of Britain's leading military deception planners, was the first to describe explicitly this connection in a brilliantly original scientific paper. See R. V. Jones, "The Theory of Practical Joking—Its Relevance to Physics", Bulletin of the Institute of Physics (June 1957), 193-201. Reprinted with minor revisions as "The Theory of Practical Joking – An Elaboration", Bulletin of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, Vol.11, No.1/2 (January/February, 1975), 10-17.

  420Endfield audiotape (Fall 1992).

  421Endfield in Rosenbaum (1993), 49.

  And when he became one of Orson's magic teachers while both were in their late twenties, Cy perceived Orson as also conjuring for this darker purpose.422 Whenever a sorceror performs to gain power over others, to manipulate them, he or she becomes machiavellian in its worst sense.

  Like most deceivers, most con artists, Orson was continually but pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to fool people. If so many could be deceived by War of the Worlds, how far could he take them? So he tested, pushing the limits of human gullibility. He’d developed one scenario that he’d try out on people, using Paul Stewart as his straight man. Stewart describes the time he and his wife were with Orson and Rita Hayworth when Rita became the target:423

  Orson will say anything anywhere to anybody and look them straight in the eye. I remember when ... we were sitting in the Cub Room of the Stork Club, and he says to me, “Will you do me a favor? Tell Rita how I jumped out of a plane and parachuted into Chicago when we were late for a broadcast.”

  And I said, “My God, I’d forgotten that,” as though I could have forgotten such a thing. And I went on, “The only thing is, I’m hazy on the details, I remember I was scared to death when I saw you do it.” ...

  And Orson goes on to tell how we’re flying from New York to Chicago—you had to do it then in hops with small planes—and we stopped to refuel in Buffalo, and we refueled in Detroit and flew on to Chicago. And he tells Rita, “I was so late, I said to the pilot, ‘Circle Lincoln Park. I’m going to parachute in. I know I can make it.’”

  And I looked at Rita and she had some eyes and they were this big. And my wife—she knew. She kicked me under the table.

  AROUND THE WORLD FROM BOSTON TO BROADWAY On November 30th, nine days after wrapping the set on The Stranger, Orson made a quick trip to New York City to talk with song-writer Cole Porter. He wanted a musical comedy adapted from Jules Verne's famous 1873 novel Around the World in Eighty Days. He would direct the show and write the book and Porter agreed to compose the music.

  Porter far excelled even Orson in outrageous autobiographical fakery. For example his once widely accepted claims to have served on the Western Front in WW I and in the French Foreign Legion and the Army of France have been flatly disproved. And he went beyond the then usual obfuscations to conceal his unadulterated homosexuality.424 Except for their differences in sexuality and age (Porter was 23 years older), the two had much in common: a precocious mid-West upbringing in well-to-do but eccentric families, private schooling, the world of theater, music, highly creative, lustful living, practical joking. Unfortunately, too little of their personal relationship has been recorded to know whether they swapped lies or truths, or played practical jokes, or just kept their dealings on a strictly professional level. Probably the latter, as Porter’s notorious snobbery would have quickly worn thin with Orson. Nor did Orson share Porter’s after-hours' hobby when, joined by actor Monty Woolley, he’d cruise the black male brothels of Harlem for “rough trade”.

  422 Endfield audiotape (Fall 1992).

  423Stewart interview in Meryman (1978), 253-254.

  424Joseph Morella and George Mazzei, Genius and Lust: The Creativity and Sexuality of Cole Porter and Noel Coward (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995).

  Orson needed a stenographer. A local New York agency for freelancer stenographers sent Jeannette Wellin. She spent the day and late into the night in Orson’s suite in the Waldorf Towers while he dictated his doctoring of a Broadway play (probably Brecht’s Galileo). Orson walked around naked under on open robe while constantly scratching his genitals. Miss Wellin was embarrassed by this display but not frightened because two other people were present, a writer and a director.425

  The year 1945 closed with Orson's finances little improved over the previous one. The $62,000 for his one movie project, as director-actor in The Stranger, was supplemented from much radio work, mainly the $25,500 he'd collected from Lear Radio for 15 appearances on his own quarter-hour Orson Welles Commentaries show on ABC.

  * * * At the beginning of January Orson moved to Manhattan. At first he stayed again at the plush Waldorf-Astoria Towers, in a three-room suite. Shorty Chirello, then living in New York, signed back on as chauffeur; and Richard Wilson, just out of the OSS, rejoined him as Mercury business manager and equal partner. Orson wanted a new high-speed stenographer. This time the agency sent Jennette Wellin’s fiancé, Bill Herrick.

  On 16 January Orson had the pleasure of narrating the 3rd annual Esquire All-American Jazz Concert, which was broadcast live that evening coast-to-coast from NBC’s Manhattan studios. Sponsored by Esquire magazine, it featured three of the top winners of the magazine’s poll of jazz orchestras. Number one was Duke Ellington’s and the two others were the Nat “King” Cole Trio and Woody Herman’s “Herd”. It was a memorable battle of the two big bands, Ellington’s famous one and Herman’s newcomers alternating tunes and finishing with a joint number.426

  Orson wanted some of his smaller pieces of magic apparatus and a few items of clothing so Rita kindly shipped them to him in a trunk. He renewed acquaintance with Stuart Robson and his wondrous magic shop. Eighteen-year old Bob Orben was now working there
in his first regular job as a demonstrator. He recalls Orson coming in to seek the latest tricks. He would demo one and Orson would command, “Get out from behind the counter!" He'd step back there himself and proceed to do the trick for Orben who was astonished at his customer's ability not only to instantaneously figure out how it had been done but even immediately “improve on it". Orben found him a “very creative guy."427

  During these shopping runs in mid-Manhattan Orson surely revisited the older and more prestigious magic shop of Max Holden, which was located near Robson's. He did shop at Lou Tannen's, which had recently moved to a large upstairs suite in the Wurlitzer Building on the same street. Tony Spina, 15, was there doing magic and working as stock boy; and regular customers included Orson's friend Dick Himber as well as Bob Orben and Les Smith, both of whom first met Orson there and either then or later became casual acquaintances.428

  425 Herrick (1998), 101.

  426William D. Clancy, Woddy Herman: Chronicle of the Herds (New York: Schirmer Books, 1995), 92-93.

  427Orben telephone interview, 19 Aug 91.

  Orson's old magic dealer friend, Frank “Duke" Ducrot, had died and his famous shop behind Macy’s bought at auction for a pathetic $585. The buyer was Al Flosso who'd renamed it the FlossoHornmann Magic Company. Al, 50, was an appealing character who'd earned his “The Coney Island Fakir” nickname (given by Milton Berle) by having worked Coney as a sideshow magician in his 20s. Orson soon befriended this diminutive (5'2"),rough, honest man with the voice of a Brooklyn carnival barker. Al's son, Jack, worked in the shop where he met Orson with Himber. Jack was struck by how totally unaffected and unassuming Orson behaved for a celebrity. To accomodate Orson and Himber's wish to avoid the regular customers Al would reopen late at night, usually leaving them alone in the dingy and cluttered back room to browse among its rich collection of antique magical apparatus and memorabilia.429

  Orson committed himself to doing a free magic act for the members of The Players club. Orson wanted to do the Houdini Substitution Trunk illusion but had left his in storage in Hollywood. So Al Flosso lent him one and was amazed to watch this celebrity help wrestle the heavy trunk down the two flights of stairs to a waiting station wagon. Al immediately promoted Orson from mere celebrity status to the truly honored ranks of "a real trouper".430