Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1

by Barton Whaley

  A neat point is that, while both volunteers A and B are aware of their own parts in the swindle, neither knows of the other's. (Orson would have chosen them from different sections of the audience to reduce the chances of their comparing notes afterwards.) He stressed that he always fanned the deck in a deliberately sloppy manner, remembering his role was that of a supernormal mental marvel and not merely some tricky card magician.

  Bruce also approved Orson's style of describing his method by simply “explaining what is done where and why" without dragging in the underlying psychology or misdirection and recommended that his magician readers adopt this effect-method technique in describing their own inventions. A few wise magicians would argue that it is just such instructions on psychology and misdirection that makes the trick really work. Either way Orson obviously had the rare ability of giving concise and precise descriptions of his tricks, as all magic book and magazine editors and most of their readers will appreciate.

  482Phoenix, No.103 (5 Apr 1946), 413. 483Phoenix, No.103 (5 Apr 1946), 413-414. (Nine years later a British semi-pro magician, giving full credit, would incorporate Orson's effect into a larger two-part routine that was published in Pentagram magazine and subsequently reprinted in an American magic anthology.484)

  * * * Orson had planned to work with avant-garde German Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht since the previous December when he'd happily accepted the invitation of Brecht and Brecht's partner, Charles Laughton, to direct the American premiere of the playwrite's Galileo. Orson hoped to do this during the coming year.485 However, when that time came and after further discussions with Orson, Laughton and Brecht, concerned about the financing, by-passed Orson to bring in Mike Todd as producer—“insurance", Laughton called it. But after his recent dreary experience with Todd, Orson found this unacceptable and in late July resigned from the project.486 Orson was not brought down by his alleged habit of procrastination.487

  * * * Orson had always championed blacks as actors and musicians. He’d done so quietly by hiring them in hard times. Now, beginning on July 28th, the day after resigning from the Galileo project, he devoted five of his weekly Orson Welles Commentaries radio show on CBS to publically backing the cause of one black man. Isaac Woodard, Jr., was a World War II combat veteran, having served 15 months in the South Pacific where he’d earned a battle star. Earlier this year as the result of an argument with a bus driver in Batesburg, South Carolina, local police gaving him a beating that left him blind in both eyes. When the NAACP brought these facts to Orson’s attention, his broadcasts called out for justice, promising to discover and expose the police officer responsible.488

  Orson’s campaigning for justice in the Woodard case culminated with his appearance on 18 August 1946 at New York’s Lewisohn Stadium. This was an all-star rally in support of this left-wing cause. In addition to Orson those present included his friends Milton Berle and Billie Holiday, and several big bands including Cab Calloway’s. The ceremony concluded when the audience of 20,000 or more was addressed by Woodard, followed by Woodie Guthrie singing his The Ballad of Isaac Woodard.489 All this publicity resulted in the police officer’s prompt arrest, conviction, and a year’s imprisonment.

  * * * Around the end of September that year (1946) Orson passed through Boston with Rita. They took time off to perform at the USO Stage Door Canteen, which was located in the Copley Theatre beside the Boston Common. The servicemen greeted the Love Goddess with hollers and hoots when she appeared alone on stage in a revealing black corselet and a cape attached at the neck by a chain. She apologized for Orson's absence, explaining that he'd been delayed—not that many of the audience much cared as long as they had Rita there not only in person but in “short wardrobe", as magicians then said of their female assistants' scanty costumes. 484 Howarth (1955). Howarth's trick, "Skryering", combines Orson's "Town Skryer" with Dr. Jaks' "In the Ring", which had originally appeared in The Phoenix, No.125 (9 May 1947), 501-502.

  485John Willett (editor), Bertolt Brecht Journals (New York: Routledge, 1993), 359-361, for journal entries of 10 and 15 Dec 1945.

  486Letters Laughton to OW, [25 Jul 46], and OW to Laughton, 27 Jul 46; Lyon (1980), 180; John Fuegi, Brecht and Company (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 470.

  487Higham (1985), 232-233.

  488Leaming (1985), 329-331; Higham (1985), 233-234, 238.

  489Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1980), 314-315. This and most other sources misspell Woodard’s name as “Woodward”.

  At this point Orson himself rushes on stage dressed in casual travel clothes with a fedora hat and apologizes for not having had the time to change into proper evening attire. He scales his fedora into the wings and Rita, to cover his embarrassment, displays even more of herself by unfastening her cape and throwing it over him. A moment later she whips off the cape to reveal Orson dressed in top hat and tails. Amateur magician Art Emerson was amazed, recalling this as the best magician's Quick-Change routine he's ever seen.490

  Quick-Change, or Protean acts as originally called, require careful routining, split-second timing, and specially tailored “break-away" clothing. It had been a popular vaudeville entertainment since the mid-1800s but had virtually died out by 1930 so that few in Orson's audience of mostly young servicemen would have even known of the trick much less ever seen it. And, as we've seen, he'd first used it on stage seven years earlier in his The Green Goddess vaudeville melodrama.

  * * * That year, with his dream of reviving another big magic show out of the question in the foreseeable future, Orson decided to sell the Wonder Show's small props, large apparatus, and a truck that had remained warehoused after Chester Morris had bought what few items he'd wanted. Bill Larsen Senior, brokering the sale through his Thayer Studio of Magic, found a buyer willing to pay top dollar for most of this used stuff. The angel was Warren Gram, a rich alcoholic Oregon lumberman who'd decided he wanted to become an illusionist and tour a show of his own. Accordingly Gram hired 21-year-old magician Stan Kramien as his teacher-assistant and briefly toured his “Warren Gram's $25,000 ‘The House of Magic'" through the Western states and Vancouver, Canada. The “$25,000" figure had been cooked up by the show's PR man and doesn't reflect the actual purchase price, which was much less. Next year Gram toured a spook show under John Calvert's auspices, but with the stage name of “John Bastile" because Calvert thought it sounded “stronger" than Warren Gram. At this time a fire in one of the trailers destroyed some of Orson's original items. When the show folded that year, Kramien acquired several of the props and went on the road developing his own famous touring illusion show. Over the next decades he sold or traded off all his original Wonder Show props.491

  LADY FROM SHANGHAI From late fall until early next year (1947) Orson filmed The Lady from Shanghai. It was a Columbia thriller produced by Harry Cohn. This gave the lie to Orson's three-year-old public promise, prompted by Cohn's abrupt removal of Rita from the Mercury Wonder Show, that “I shall never appear in a Columbia picture". Similarly Cohn, enraged when Orson married Rita, had vowed that Orson would never work for him.492 An explanation is due. The previous April Orson had desperately needed $25,000 to pay the costume rental bill in time for the opening of Around the World. In a rare Faustian mood, he'd swallowed his pride and made a pact with that devil, Harry Cohn. Figuring that Cohn was “the only one with the courage" for such a deal, Orson telephoned him to propose that in return for the immediate “loan" of $25,000 he would, for free, direct and write a film version of a mystery novel. It was an offer even Cohn couldn't refuse and the deal was agreed.493

  490 Emerson telephone interview, 21 Oct 91.

  491Stan Kramien telephone interview, 25 Sep 93. His info on the extent of Orson's stuff in the show came from Gerrie Larsen. See also Charvet (1993), based on interview with Kramien.

  There's an amusing discrepancy in Orson's repeated and ever-changing tellings of the circumstances of this timely phone call. Nineteen years later he was claiming that he’d made it from the theater
box-office and when Cohn asked “What story?", Orson — having nothing specific in mind—noticed a nearby paperback rack with a mystery titled If I Die Before I Wake and gave Cohn that title.494 A cute story, but Sherwood King's mystery novel, originally published hardbound in 1938, didn't appear in paperback until 16 years after Orson's alleged phone conversation.495 Is this an example of his tall tales or did he genuinely misremember?

  In either case, Orson initially assumed he would film The Lady from Shanghai (as finally titled) as a quickie low-budget B-feature in New York City with his current lover-protégé, 21-year-old blonde French stage actress Barbara Laage, in the title role. But Harry Cohn had a different idea. Now that Rita Hayworth had left Orson and begun divorce proceedings, Cohn made it a big-budget film with Rita, at her request, co-staring with Orson. Rita surprised both Cohn and Orson by exercising her own hidden agenda—she immediately got her husband to move back in—this time into her house, a magnificent new home on Rockingham Road in Brentwood. Mademoiselle Laage was put on paid hold by Mercury Productions.

  Orson now proceeded to repay his fiscal debt to Cohn but did so with a Wellesian twist. Faust became Machiavelli when Orson set about undermining the “Love Goddess" image the studio boss had so carefully and expensively nurtured. And Rita welcomed the chance to play a role that would show her for the first time as a dramatic actress. But they would have to proceed by stealth, given Cohn's use throughout the studio of spies and bugged offices, including Orson's. While Orson supervised, Rita's famous long auburn-dyed hair was cropped close and re-dyed “topaz-blonde" at the studio, amidst the popping of hastily summoned newsmen's flash bulbs. Cohn was furious that she'd transformed herself without his permission.496 Her hair was cropped at the studio by Helen Hunt, Columbia’s chief hair stylist on a Monday. The blonde bleach job was done the following Friday. The publicity photos give the deliverage illusion that cut & bleach took place the same day, because Rita wore the same sweater and the journalists who appear in the picture were told to wear the same suits.

  And worse was to come. Orson's script contained an even greater shock. While Cohn had accepted that the supposedly romantic damsel in distress is finally revealed as a frigid, manipulative, murderous woman, he couldn't bear to have her die at the end. When Cohn saw the first cut he delayed the film's release for over a year while his studio hacks tinkered with it as best they could. Badly.

  492 Higham (1970), 111.

  493Brady (1989), 385-386.

  494Welles (1965), as quoted by Sarris (1971), 157-158. Later versions by Welles are in Griffin (1982), 136, where the paperback (misrecalled by OW as The Man I Killed) is being read by the ticket girl and the amount of Cohn's loan becomes $50,000; With Orson Welles (in 1982); Higham (1985), 229-230; and Brady (1989), 385-386. In his 1982 With Orson Welles interview version he says he asked for and Cohn gave $55,000 for the paperback (which he again miscalls The Man I Killed) that the box-office girl was reading while he was on the phone. Incidentally Orson's citing the title as The Man I Killed is an anachronism. It is indeed the title of a mystery novel (by John Creasey, writing as "Michael Halliday"), but it wasn't published until 1961 in Britain and 1963 in the USA.

  495This discrepancy was first reported by Higham (1985), 229.

  496Leaming (1989), 134-135.

  Anyone deep into deception planning would automatically assume that Orson would have used his knowledge of a bugged office to play further games on King Cohn. However he took this opportunity only to joke. Arriving at the office in the morning, he'd play a gramophone record of the theme from his current radio show and then address the walls: “Well, good morning everybody. This is Mercury Productions beginning another day's work. We hope you'll enjoy it." And at the end he'd announce “Well, that winds up another day at the Mercury. Tune in tomorrow."497

  The main location shooting was done in and around the new popular Mexican resort town of Acapulco. Orson and Rita flew down from LA on a chartered plane. The cast and crew even rented Errol Flynn’s fine yacht, the Zaca, for some key on-board scenes in Acapulco harbor. Captain Flynn himself appeared uncredited in some of them. This would begin a long friendship between he and Orson.

  During a location shoot one twilight in late December in Sausalito on San Francisco Bay, the Great Director was in such a bad mood that someone asked, “What's the matter with Orson?" An actor teasingly replied, “Oh, he's sore because the sun's going down behind the Golden Gate—and it didn't ask him if it could."498

  Although the movie contains no conjuring as such, its famous climactic scene in a deserted amusement park is the director's magical mind-game played out at two levels. In a hall-of-mirrors Orson rejects Rita, stepping aside to leave her to face a mortal shootout with her father-figure husband, played superbly by Everett Sloane. It's an astonishing tour de force visually expressing the director's belief that only a thin but easily understood line divides illusion from reality. One critic aptly observed that this “mirror-maze sequence [is] the grandest example of Welles's delight in movie illusionism."499 But underlying its flickering theatrical images—as one perceptive biographer proves – the scene also mirrors Rita's real-life fragmented personality received at the hands and body of her domineering and incestuouspimping father and her desertions by Orson.500 Was Orson venting rage against a secretly hated Rita? Or was he selfishly appeasing his own guilt? Or was he creatively practicing psychodrama as a farewell gesture to help heal his estranged but still beloved wife's shattered mind?501 Orson was never long on guilt; and a psychodrama would have been very much within his Magician's character.

  “A wilderness of mirrors" has become an overworked catch-phrase. Coined by T. S. Eliot in his poem Gerontion to suggest psychological chaos, it's contrary to the laws of optics and fits the “reality" only of paranoids. Orson, always the rational magic man, puts us into this bewilderness to make us feel its terror. But, at the climax, he deliberately exposes the simple method: As Hayworth and Sloane fire in increasingly frustrated rage at the phantom images of their targets—each other—mirror after mirror is shattered until finally their illusory images become real and both achieve their lethal goals. Their two fictional characters are dead or dying, but the audience has seen how it was all done with mirrors.

  497 OW in Griffin (1982), 137-138; Brady (1989), 401.

  498Fred Braue "Roundabout" news column in Hugard's Magic Monthly, Vol.4, No.8 (Jan 1947), 288.

  499Naremore (1978), 153.

  500Leaming (1989), 132.

  501A point partially raised by Richard T. Jameson in Gottesman (1976), 76.

  For many people in many cultures, mirrors represent a sharp but mysterious juncture between reality and illusion.502 Orson, fully aware of how conjurors use mirrors to create illusion, often exploited this mythic notion in his films. Thus when the title character in Citizen Kane steps between two facing full-length mirrors, his image is momentarily copied into infinity, although he is only one flesh-and-blood man walking down a hallway oblivious to the startling visual effect he had just caused. Orson elaborated this in 1941 and 1944 in two never-made movie scripts, as described in the following sidebar. Another mirror scene was cut from The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).503 And, after Lady from Shanghai, mirrors would again have special moments in Othello (1952, that scene having been shot in 1949), Fountain of Youth (1956/1958), and The Immortal Story (1968).

  {SIDEBAR:} PRECEDENTS? We’ve seen that Orson had already introduced a mirror illusion during the making of Citizen Kane in 1940. But was this the immediate inspiration of his famous Hall of Mirrors in The Lady from Shanghai?

  I wonder whether Orson, an early fan of Chaplin’s movies, had seen and remembered the hall-ofmirrors sequence in Chaplin’s Oscar-winning The Circus (1928).

  Or what of Bret Wood’s remark that the It’s All True “Love Story” segment script dated 8 Aug 1941 by John Fante (with Norman Foster)had a passing penny arcade scene that included a “Crystal Maze” (hall of mirrors) “setpiece which resurfaced in Welles’ films.”
504

  A hall of mirrors next appears in 1944 in another of Orson’s never-made movie scripts — a “farce melodrama” dated 27 Jul 1944, by Les White and Bud Pearson titled “Don’t Catch Me.” There a “Maze of Mirrors” figures in next to last scene where it is the setting for a shootout amidst shattering mirrors between the three good guys and a gang of Nazi agents. Wood sees this as the immediate precursor of Lady’s climax.505

  {END SIDEBAR}

  In all his works Orson presents us with a compelling illusion, invites our participation, and then savagely exposes the reality. Having demonstrated his skills as a mystifier, a charlatan, he becomes the good teacher who gives us his hard-earned insights. As the magnificent Jeanne Moreau, one of his later actresses, would recognize, “The eye of Orson Welles' camera, looking, staring, gazing, glancing, creates the magic spell that breaks the bad one. We watch. We know we won't be misled."506

  * * * In late February 1947 Rita gave Orson his final heave-ho and reactivated her divorce action, this time in earnest. He moved from her palatial home in Brentwood to a rented beach house in Santa Monica at 451 Ocean Drive.

  Cynical gossip writers assumed an inevitable breakup between a hopelessly mismatched “Beauty and the Brain”.507 However the assumption that all their association had going was her “sexuality” and his intellect trivializes deeply unresolved differences in their personalities based on her insecurity and his confidence. Even if this stereotypical model of incompatibility applies to some stupid and boring wives used by intellectual and snobbish men, Rita and Orson don’t fit that model. In fact, her love and his usually tender concern continued for years beyond their breakup.